Both Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley (who never knew her mother) longed to take the world by storm. Stephanie Marie Thornton delves into the literary, emotional and financial struggles of both women in her eighth novel, Her Lost Words, charting their journeys with compassion and insight.
Thornton (A Most Clever Girl) begins her narrative in 1775 with Mary Wollstonecraft, who escapes her miserable childhood and flees to London with a head full of feminist ideas and dreams of becoming a published author. Eventually, she travels to post-revolutionary Paris, where she falls in love with a blockade-running American, Gilbert Imlay, and bears his child. When it becomes dangerous for British citizens to remain in Paris, Wollstonecraft and her daughter return to London, only to find Imlay uninterested in marriage, and increasingly dismissive of Wollstonecraft. To her surprise, Wollstonecraft ends up building a life with philosopher William Godwin, who supports both her domestic and literary endeavors.
Thornton intersperses this narrative with the life story of Wollstonecraft's second daughter, Mary Shelley (born Mary Godwin), who has grown up in the shadow of her mother's fame, but longs to know what kind of person she truly was. Frustrated by life with her father and stepmother, though fond of her sisters, Fanny and Claire, Mary welcomes the passionate eruption of poet Percy Shelley into her life.
Drawing extensively on the known historical facts about each woman (and their spouses, lovers and children), Thornton creates two protagonists whose brains and emotions blaze brilliantly on the page. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams