Afterword

After being dismissed as governess in 1787 by the haughty Kingsboroughs in Ireland, Mary Wollstonecraft returned to London with the manuscript of Mary, a Fiction in hand, and was fed, housed, and published by bookseller Joseph Johnson, who became her patron and surrogate father. (The titles bookseller and publisher seem to have been virtually interchangeable in that era, since booksellers were often publishers.) She became both famous and infamous when in late January, 1792, he published her signature work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and critic Horace Walpole labelled her a “hyena in petticoats.” In February, she told her sister Everina that the book had instigated a marriage proposal, but “a handsome house and a proper man did not tempt me.”

She was living on Store Street in London during that winter and spring of ’92, seemingly unable to write. Whether this writer’s block came from some psychological fear of success, or from her obsession with the artist Henry Fuseli, I doubt even she knew. But the fact remains that she was not working on the projected Part Two of Vindication, in which she would expose and offer solutions to the biased laws governing women. It was only after her unsuccessful and humiliating attempt to join the Fuseli household in a platonic ménage à trois, that she went to Paris in the autumn of 1792 to see the Revolution for herself, and at her publisher’s urging (and with a monetary advance), to write a series of “Letters from the Revolution.” As the world knows, she did write the work, but lost her head (metaphorically speaking) to an American adventurer, and her reputation in the process.

What else was she doing during that winter and spring of seeming desuetude? Little that I’ve been able to ascertain, other than reading “to improve” herself, conversing with like-minded Dissenters at Johnson’s literary suppers, and handing out money to her needy father and siblings. So my mystery would seem to suit her restless and curious mind, along with her outrage at injustice of any kind.

Apart from her fellow Dissenters and other acquaintances whose short biographies are listed below, I have added a number of fictional characters: the maid Dulcie; the printer Cyrus Hunt; French émigrés Jacques St Pierre and Alfred de Charpentier; editor Edgar Ashcroft; Lillian Guilfoy and her fiancé Roger Peale; the bluestocking Isobel Frothingham and her natural daughter Annie. (Mary did for a time take in a motherless young girl named Ann who had “animal spirits and quick feelings,” but who stole sugar and lied about it.) And Mary never did call herself a bluestocking, although literary women read and discussed her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in their salons.