Happy Friday! I love being able to share book-related things with you when it’s time for the weekend, and I have a few exciting book treats to post over the next few days, starting with my review of Stephanie Marie Thornton’s soon-to-be released novel, Her Lost Words, my copy courtesy of Berkley Trade and Penguin Randomhouse!

I am absolutely fascinated by the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, often labelled the first feminist, and her writing: in particular, I referred to her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) all throughout my PhD when I was writing about female education.

She died at only thirty-eight years old, of childbed fever when giving birth to her daughter with William Godwin, also Mary.

This daughter would grow up to become Mary Shelley: none other than the author of Frankenstein.

The relationship between the two, and their achievements, is absolutely fascinating.

Wollstonecraft published many revolutionary writings advocating for women’s rights, and Shelley is the mother of modern science fiction writing.

Shelley often lived in the shadow of the mother she was desperate to know, and Wollstonecraft’s legacy was tinged with judgement after the publication of William Godwin’s memoir of his wife. Written with love at its core and a desire to acquaint the world with the true majesty of Wollstonecraft’s mind, in actual fact, it caused people to revile against her and her lifestyle: having children out of marriage, attempting suicide, and other dramatic elements that were, to be honest, an extreme miscalculation on Godwin’s part.

It is this legacy with which Stephanie Marie Thornton grapples in her fantastic novel Her Lost Words, which alternates between the perspectives of Wollstonecraft and Shelley, exploring their lives, desire to live independently by the pen (without reliance on men) and the passions of their lives in parallel.

History is shadowy even at recording broad strokes of important women’s lives – the dates of their births, their schooling or lack thereof, and the titles of their written works, their first loves, and the names of all their progeny.

Her Lost Words, Stephanie Marie Thornton

The desires of the two women’s lives are not that alien to us as readers now: but to be able to live independently, not have to rely on marrying, and to love freely were certainly fodder for scandal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Thornton does a wonderful job of capturing the spirit of both women without reducing them to types: they are different characters, with different voices, and I feel that this novel honours the legacy of both of them.

With Wollstonecraft, we begin in early 1775, when she was desperately keen to break free from her childhood in Hoxton, where she was raised in a household by an abusive alcoholic father: then we jump forward to mid-1787, when Wollstonecraft have moved to London to try and live by her pen and sell her novel.

She eventually does, to publisher Joseph Johnson, and it sets her life upon a new course that saw her befriend chief intellectuals and radicals of the day, and live in Paris during the time of the revolution.

For Mary Godwin Shelley, her story begins in March 1814, when her father has invited Percy Shelley, the famed poet (and of considerable inherited fortune) for dinner in the hopes that he might lend them money. The dinner is a lifechanging one that sees young Mary fall in love with Shelley, despite the fact he has already married.

Thornton neatly plots the biographies of both writers alongside each other. It reminds me of a biography I read of both women in tandem called Romantic Outlaws, by Charlotte Gordon, which does a similar thing. I really enjoy it, because it truly emphasises the connection between the two women even though Shelley had no time with her mother at all.

No matter what she wrote, her every word would be held to the light of her mother’s works, or even her father’s. Probably Percy’s as well. And like a paste jewel next to a diamond, her prose would be found wanting. So each time Mary pushed away the quill and paper and instead contended herself by reading with the intent of cramming every corner of her mind with all manner of ideas.

Her Lost Words, Stephanie Marie Thornton

I do not want to spoil the novel for those readers who don’t know the sequence of Wollstonecraft and Shelley’s lives, so I won’t say much more on the storyline, other than that you can tell the depth of research the author has put into writing fictional versions of the events in each of their lives. It is a fascinating story of the lives of women, and of two of the most groundbreaking authors in the world of Western literature that manages to reconcile their goddess-like status with their relationship as mother and daughter, as sisters and friends and wives.

Thornton does a wonderful job of writing with depth every character that was involved in both women’s histories, and I read with bated breath, even though I knew what was going to happen to both of them!

I would definitely recommend this to anybody who enjoys historical fiction set on the cusp of the nineteenth century, as well as women’s and literary histories.

Her Lost Words will be published as a Berkley Trade Paperback on March 28th 2023!

Thank you to Berkley Trade and Penguin Randomhouse for sharing a copy of the novel with me in exchange for an honest review.