Customer Reviews

Vindication: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Frances Sherwood masterfully retells the life and times of Mary Wollstonecraft. Friend to William Blake, Henry Fuseli and other artists, her biography is here given distinctly modern treatment. A fascinating woman, she witnessed the French Revolution, spent weeks locked up in infamous Bedlam, and had a series of disastrous love affairs. Sherwood's recreation of 18th-century London draws the reader in completely. Once started, you will find it difficult to put this book down

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.

I knew from history class that Mary Wollstonecraft was an early feminist and the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of "Frankenstein". I had no idea what an incredibly eventful and meaningful life she led until I read this book. Wollstonecraft's childhood was very edgy and anxiety-producing, with an alcoholic and abusive father, and a mother whose own perversity played to his abuse. The reader gets the impression that the mother has to participate in the disfunction to keep a roof over her head. Her loving paternal grandfather, who knew how unreliable his son was, left a will taking care of both his grandaughters and grandson. Wollstonecraft's brother who had been a co-sufferer with his two sisters in the traumatic setting of their childhood, betrayed them by challenging the will in court. He succeeded in overturing the non-traditional will so Wollstonecraft and her sister were left indigent in spite of her grandfather's wishes. In that era, a woman's only option for supporting herself was marriage, witness the desperation of Wollstonecraft's mother. A freethinker, Wollstonecraft continued to walk a tightrope all through life, getting involved sexually with several intellectual leading lights of her age (with results ranging from embarrassing and frustrating to disasterous, just like nowadays), bearing a child out of wedlock, and always lacking in any kind of security in spite of her own prominence in the intellectual arena. The effects of her individualism even resulted in imprisonment in the infamous asylum "Bedlam". This is the amazingly written story of a very interesting woman from history. If you read this, you will definitely not be bored, and you will see what important changes feminism has brought about in a relatively short period of time thanks to people like Mary Wollstonecraft.

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.

One of the best books I've read. Excellent recreation of the life and times of an exceptional woman.

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!

The blockheadedness & utter insensitivity of the two reviews below, in an open forum such as this, demand a response.

Frances Sherwood's reimagining of the life of the brave Mary Wollstonecraft, the woman who wrote the groundsbreaking "Vindication of the Rights of Women," proves quite the equal of her subject. Sherwood brilliantly recreates her protagonist's haunted Enlightenment world, at once alive with new ideas & half-smothered in medieval fears & prejudice. Better still, however, her history goes far beyond the merely correct, investing its conflicts with the chilled yet heightened humanity they must've engendered at the time. The "Mary" of this book has the wallop of her namesake, providing a new testament to women's toil & tragedy while never losing her humor, her smarts, or her desires.

I read several reviews on this book already, and feel that what I have to say about this book has already been said. I loved this book, and found it to be quite the page turner.

I first read this novel the year it was published and I was taking Prof. Sherwoods creative writing class at Indiana University. We all remember her moment of pure joy and modest disbelief. Frances is talented, tireless and very down to earth. The novel shows her dedication not only to research, but in telling a great story. She first mastered short story writing, and then the novel. I was not surprised to see that this wonderful teacher/writer has published many other novels since I last saw her. Readers won't be disappointed, and I urge them to read her short stories as well.
Chrissy K. McVay - (former student of Prof. Sherwood)
Author of 'Souls of the North Wind'

I'd have given this book Zero stars, if that had been an option. Sherwood's writing style is crude at best, with some of her sentences making little to no sense at all. There writing flows very poorly (if at all), and the metaphors are some of the worst I've seen. The dialogue is boring and simplistic. I also agree with the reviewers that said this book is unnecessarily vulgar in many places. One of the worst books I've read in a long while.