Hello, friends! 'Tis the season for guest-blogging, apparently. My weekly post is up today at the Booksmugglers, where I'm talking about 2014 as My Year of Non-Fiction. If you read my History Girls post about Freddy Spencer Chapman last week, some of this will be familiar but you might hang want to in there for a little about Fanny Wollstonecraft/Godwin/Imlay, the firstborn daughter of the … [Read more...]
I was wrong
Hello, friends. Last week I mentioned my new and rather frantic interest in Fanny Imlay/Godwin/Wollstonecraft. After Judith Chernaik's Mab's Daughters and Janet Todd's Death and the Maidens, my reading led me to Daisy Hay's Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation, and I am so glad it did. I'll start by confessing that I was never especially enamoured of … [Read more...]
The woman without a name
Hello, friends. Recently, I mentioned reading and loving Claire Tomalin's biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. I've now become completely obsessed with the question of Mary Wollstonecraft's elder daughter, Fanny. Fanny was born in 1794 in revolutionary Paris, the result of a short, passionate affair between Wollstonecraft and a handsome, fickle, frequently dishonest American named Gilbert Imlay. … [Read more...]