Hello, friends. I'm very excited about my blog post this week, which will go live at the History Girls on Friday. That's when I'll interview Mackenzi Lee, whose historical fantasy debut, This Monstrous Thing, rocked my reading world in November. We'll be talking about inspiration, taking liberties with history, and the scandalous Mary Shelley and her circle. Please do join us on Friday! … [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...]