Her story points up all the unfairnesses that afflicted Wollstonecraft's life, but, unlike some later commentators, Tomalin never edges into hagiography – she is very clear-sighted about her subject's many failings, and indeed often presents her as a rather unlikeable (if unforgettable) character. The results, I think, are hugely impressive. This is the more impressive because this book was first published way back in 1974, before (for example) Tyson's biography of Joseph Johnson, or Weinstein's collection of Fuseli's correspondence: Tomalin had to do all that heavy lifting herself. Claire Tomalin does all of this so well that I am a little in awe at her skills throwaway brilliancies depend, when you consult the notes, on obscure and far-flung references that I have seen nowhere else she captures Henry Fuseli better than many books about Fuseli do, and her portrait of Georgian London is better than not a few histories of the period. Mary Wollstonecraft's life, although unusually tragic, was tragic in a way that throws a direct light on the revolutionary world that she lived through and contributed to – which means that telling her story properly requires getting to grips with early feminism, religious dissent, London's radical counterculture, the nightmarish complexity of revolutionary Paris, and a dozen other things besides.
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