Book review: ‘Her Lost Words’ - Stephanie Marie Thornton [by Richard Crawford]
In “Her Lost Words”, Stephanie Marie Thornton compares the lives of two free-thinking women who refused to accept the conventional gender roles of their day. Mary Wollstonecraft left her home in Hoxton where her drunken father had abused both her and her mother, to become “the first of a new genus” of women who earned an independent income from writing books such as “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, also left home unmarried, and ran off to France with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley where they associated with the notorious libertine Lord Byron (once described as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”) at whose instigation she wrote the well-known Gothic horror novel “Frankenstein”.
To escape the conventional route of marriage, both women turned to writing for a living as a means to achieve independence. Mary Wollstonecraft established her reputation with her book “A Vindication of the Rights of Men” (1790), a rebuttal of Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” of the same year, and subsequently travelled to Paris at the height of the French Revolution to witness events at first hand. Thornton devotes two interesting chapters to an account of Wollstonecraft’s experiences in Paris, including a horrifying description of a political meeting at which the crowd of “sans culottes” stoned the French feminist activist Théroigne de Méricourt, leaving her stricken with brain damage. Such gruesome passages are offset by lengthy descriptions of Mary’s love affair with American entrepreneur Gilbert Imray in Paris, which is written in a sentimental prose style reminiscent of popular romantic novels. In these love scenes, the quick-witted radical critic of patriarchy who wrote the classic feminist text “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” is replaced by an impressionable young girl who is swept away by romantic feelings. The rapid and complete transformation of Mary from critical intellectual to romantic heroine is difficult to believe, but the author reminds us that William Godwin, who was later to become her husband, described her as an “overly emotional woman” in his memoir about her life.
Mary Shelley’s fame rests chiefly on her first book, “Frankenstein”, the story of a scientist who discovers a way to re-animate dead bodies. Written when she was only nineteen and revised shortly afterwards, “Frankenstein” was the first of many novels that Mary Shelley authored. The experiences that gave Mary the idea of Frankenstein and the monster he created are described, and Thornton devotes a chapter to the events surrounding the writing of the story at the Villa Diodati, a house that Byron had rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland where Mary, Percy, Byron and Mary’s sister Claire were all staying. Byron is reported to have proposed a competition to this group of friends, to see who could write the best horror story. Mary Shelly decides to write “Frankenstein” whilst Percy and Byron each start to write their own horror stories. Thornton omits to mention that John Polidari, Byron’s personal physician and later author of “the Vampyre” (which he based on a fragment of Lord Byron’s writing) was also present. Perhaps Thornton thought that Polidari would have complicated the sexual dynamics of the Villa Diodati scene? It does seem remarkable that two of the great classics of horror fiction, “Frankenstein” and “Dracula”, should have originated in a Swiss chalet.
The lives of the two Marys seem to have developed along a similar path. Both had illegitimate children: Mary Wollstonecraft by Gilbert Imray and Mary Godwin by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Both subsequently married (according to Thornton) for love: Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin, and Mary Godwin to Percy Bysshe Shelley. But after marriage, the course of their lives was radically different. Mary Wollstonecraft died from an infection just eleven days after giving birth to Mary Godwin, whilst Mary Shelley lived to see her husband drowned when his boat capsized in a ferocious storm and spent much of her later years editing and promoting his writings.
According to Thornton, Mary Wollstonecraft’s untimely death aroused in Mary Shelley a powerful desire to know more about her mother’s life. Quite early on in the novel, she invents scenes in which Mary Shelley discovers her father’s memoir of her mother’s life and, in a later chapter - in what could be seen as the climax of the book - she has Mary’s stepmother, Jane Clairmont, deliver a copy of her mother’s own (fictitious) memoir to her, explaining that her mother had written it in the last days of her life and that she had saved it from being destroyed when her father had thrown it into the fire in a fit of grief. Jane thus passed an authentic account of her mother’s life over to the bereaved Mary Shelley and so brought mother and daughter together at the end of the novel.
The first half of the book, in which the two Marys’ lives are recounted in alternate chapters, works rather better than the closing chapters because it is more firmly based on fact. When the author speaks for her heroines, they drown in a sea of hyperbole. In the second half of this book, for instance, Thornton recounts the awful tragedies that befell Mary Shelley after her marriage to Percy, including the death of her infant daughter and the suicide of her sister Fanny. Her heroine is swept along by uncontrollable emotions brought about by these life-changing events and Thornton wastes no opportunity to describe the heartaches she suffers at each dreadful blow. Upon hearing of her husband’s death at sea, for instance, she writes; “Mary’s legs finally gave out, and Byron barely caught her as she plunged through all the flaming circles of hell”. This is the language of feelings taking over, and it signals the author’s intention to put her heroine’s emotional lives on an equal footing with their professional and political lives. Thornton has not set out to write a biography. “Her Lost Words” is loosely based on the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley but the protagonists are the author’s creations, not the historical figures we know.
Richard Crawford
August 2023
All opinions are those of the reviewer, and do not reflect the views and opinions of the Newington Green Meeting House.
This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and Richard Crawford. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
