TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (February 13, 2025): After her husband drowned off the coast of Tuscany, Mary Shelley relayed an unusual request to her stepmother in London. Would she send a “remembrance” of her mother, the revolutionary-era philosopher of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died shortly after Shelley’s birth? In response, Mary Shelley’s father put aside one of her mother’s rings, crafted from pearls and a lock of hair taken from Wollstonecraft’s closest female friend, Fanny Blood: a gothic symbol of eternal love.
Like the bejewelled ring with Fanny’s hair, Wollstonecraft and her first love lived on – thanks to the retelling of their life stories by other philosophers and writers. As a kind of female Socrates, Wollstonecraft sketched the contours of a new form of philosophy, undertaken not necessarily by writing, but also and more fundamentally by living and experimenting. An author of autobiographical novels and epistolary memoirs, Wollstonecraft used personal narratives to ground her defence of the rights of the poor, women, children, African slaves and Native Americans as integral to the “rights of humanity”. Later thinkers, especially in the feminist tradition, have attempted to flesh out this story of human emancipation left incomplete by her untimely death at the age of thirty-eight.