Just Announced: The Children's & YA Book Awards Winners Explore Now

Vindication

Add to Wishlist

Vindication

eBook

$11.99

View All Available Formats & Editions

eBook
$11.99

View All Available Formats & Editions

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.

WANT A NOOK? Explore Now

Buy As Gift

Related collections and offers

Overview

Vindication is a prodigious, spectacular debut - a whirlwind of a novel that offers a passionate and surprising vision of life and love through the lens of the turbulent, romantic, often brutal eighteenth century.

"Sherwood's heralded debut is an arresting and convincing portrayal of Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman and perhaps the first feminist. Lending her subject a modern sensibility, Sherwood describes Mary's wretched childhood, and follows her through the humiliation of demeaning jobs and chronic poverty." - Publishers Weekly

Product Details
About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466808355
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/01/1993
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	435
File size:	501 KB

About the Author

A native of Washington, D.C., Frances Sherwood is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of an NEA grant. Her stories, which have twice won O. Henry Awards, are collected in the volume Everything You've Heard Is True (1989). She lives in South Bend, Indiana, where she teaches at Indiana University, and is working on a new novel.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

Sherwood's heralded debut is an arresting and convincing portrayal of Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman and perhaps the first feminist. Lending her subject a modern sensibility, Sherwood describes Mary's wretched childhood, and follows her through the humiliation of demeaning jobs and chronic poverty. Eventually, via the publication of Vindication and other books, Wollstonecraft becomes the most famous female author of her times. Wisely, Sherwood resists romanticizing Mary's complex personality. While she portrays her as intelligent, witty, idealistic and courageous, she also acknowledges the difficult edges of her character: Mary is impetuous, nervous, wildly passionate and subject to melancholy; she is self-destructive and full of self-doubt. In fact, her life is a series of ironies and contradictions: the crusader who writes that ``marriage is legalized prostitution'' finally finds safe harbor in a union with a man she had scorned; and, tragically, having survived a stint in Bedlam and a suicide attempt, Mary dies just when she has achieved the unimpeded means to write. In meticulously rendered background detail, Sherwood describes the brutal realities of the 18th century: public hangings, maimed children, abused women; the excesses of the French Revolution are acutely observed through Wollstonecraft's eyes. There are also droll and vivid portraits of publisher Joseph Johnson and the habitues of his salon, including firebrand Tom Paine, artist Henry Fuseli and a most eccentric William Blake. Boldly conceived and adroitly paced, the narrative builds in dramatic power. There is one cavil, however: by embroidering the facts of Wollstonecraft's life, interjecting some imagined experiences into a narrative that otherwise hews to the facts as we know them, Sherwood may confuse readers into thinking that everything here is true. But her virtuosity succeeds in rendering the torments of a brilliant mind struggling against hypocritical and punitive social codes. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 made Mary Wollstonecraft the most famous woman in Europe. She traveled to Paris to observe the French Revolution but arrived just in time to witness the terror. She had a child out of wedlock and was abandoned by the father, attempted suicide, and spent months chained to the wall in a lunatic asylum. She was on intimate terms with leading intellectuals of the day, including William Blake, Thomas Paine, and William Godwin, with whom she had a daughter, Mary, who later became the author of Frankenstein . What's most remarkable about this fictional biography is that it manages to touch upon so many trendy topics--child abuse, mental illness, homosexuality, and drug addiction--without departing from the basic facts. Sherwood emphasizes the contemporary relevance of Wollstonecraft's life but keeps the book historically grounded with abundant 18th-century detail. This first novel is recommended for most collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/93.-- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Library Journal

Academics debate the lines between biography and historical fiction; readers are unlikely to care when the subject is a woman whose life is as fascinating and whose concerns are as contemporary as Mary Wollstonecraft's. She was an intellectual intimate of early Romantic-era philosophers and artists such as Blake, Fuseli, and Paine; the author in 1792 of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"; the wife of William Godwin; and a mother who died giving birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley), author of "Frankenstein". Sherwood portrays her as a remarkable woman who transcends her era. To escape an abusive home, Wollstonecraft became a seamstress and governess and ran a girls' school before finding a home, salon, and work as a writer at Joseph Johnson's "Analytical Review". Driven to attempted suicide by unhappy relationships with married and otherwise unavailable men (including a passionate affair with an American in Paris), she finally married the reformer Godwin, then died, at 37, of childbed fever, after bearing their famous daughter. Sherwood captures the late eighteenth century's intellectual ferment and brutal living conditions in an entertaining novel that makes past and present mutually illuminating.

Mary Carroll

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews