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| AUTHOR: | Frances Sherwood |
| CATEGORY: | Book |
| MANUFACTURER: | Farrar Straus & Giroux (T) |
| ISBN: | 0374283907 |
| TYPE: | 1759-1797, American First Novelists, American Historical Fiction, Fiction, Great Britain, History, Wollstonecraft, Mary,, Wollstonecraft, Mary |
| MEDIA: | Hardcover |
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Customer Reviews of Vindication
A Classic - translated into 14 languages National Book Nomin This is a masterpiece - that women especially will find
engaging - being dramatic fictionalized history . It brings to life an important intellectual who had being discarded on the
heap of HIS-tory. The ending is on a level with "Citizen Kane".
and the book has been optioned to make a move. A True work
of Art. Not to be missed william blake, hesse, and joyce
would be proud!
(4.5)A thoughtful assessment of a tortured life
A thoughtful assessment of a tortured life
Sherwood's touch is pitch perfect, bringing to life 18th Century England, days of abject poverty and the insurmountable chasm between poor and wealthy. Mary Wollstonecraft is born into a family that lives on the edge, everything meager, from scarce provisions to scarcer emotions. This familial absence of love mirrors the lack of all in a family defined by misery. Mary's childhood is a nightmare of drunkenness and depravity visited upon the girl and her helpless siblings, the father a drunkard and the mother his willing victim.
Mary's awakening as a woman is much delayed, albeit inevitable, having wasted so many years trapped by dire circumstances. Her attractiveness exponential to her fearless intelligence, Mary's writing consumes her, yet is a separate agony from the one regarding the men in her life. Predictably, Mary is haunted by childhood abuse, insecure in her dealings with men. In a beautiful blend of fact and fiction, Wollstonecraft experiences firsthand the horrors of Bedlam, the day-to-day insanity of the French revolution and the Age of Enlightenment. This novel is not frivolous; the crafting of Vindication is superb, but painful: nothing in this woman's life is without difficulty. Although her childhood experiences shadow the rest of her days, Mary's intellect is intransigent. Through her suffering comes an intimate knowledge of women's roles in a world that inevitably restricts their choices.
Wollstonecraft's seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, is a logical extension of the Enlightenment's determination of the rights of man, as seen through the eyes of a woman. Her publisher entertains a salon with contemporaries like William Blake, William Godwin, Thomas Paine and, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft, the equal of them all. Yet Mary is dogged by a constant discontent, " a kind of celestial poorhouse overseen by Father Time and monitored by Mother May I." Eventually, Mary becomes more attentive to the energetic rhetoric of the weekly discussions.
Sherwood focuses on daily life, shrewd and unflinching. Each of Mary's foolish romantic fantasies is tempered with the feral details of life in 18th Century Europe. Although the luminaries that are Mary's contemporaries wax poetic on the nature of the universe, reality is actually quite tedious. The author's consummate skill is obvious in the quality of her characters, especially Mary, her complexities, questioning spirit and drive to succeed. Accomplishing a prodigious feat, Sherwood's Mary Wollstonecraft comes alive in the pages of Vindication, correcting, arguing and searching for a sense of comfort that she will never know. The rendering of this tortured life is exquisite, determined and inspirational. Luan Gaines/2004.
A Fair Minded Review
Vindication is a fascinating look at the life of a woman born too soon, who was intelligent, spirited, and disillusioned with the man's world she found herself in. Frances Sherwood does a tremendous job of exploring Mary's forays into independence followed by regression into the traditional, accepted woman's role. In answer to other reviews, the sexual situations are not extreme (if you're reading historical fiction, you should assume that the author has the right to imagine what her character was like in every aspect of her life) and help to explain why Mary was continually pulled back into relationships with men...she enjoyed physical intimacy. Unfortunately, she equated intimacy with love and acceptance and like many women then and now, found herself seduced into hoping for "happily ever after", but on her own terms. This book is an insightful look into life in the 18th century for both sexes.