But Sherwood doesn’t try to outdo the facts; she plunges into them, discovering (or creating–it hardly matters) a horribly mistreated child, a tormented woman, an angry feminist, a passionate writer. Sherwood’s Wollstonecraft is a lurid creation, subject to horrors piled on horrors, not only beaten by her father but rejected by her mother and sexually abused by her nurse. As an adult she is pathetic, often infuriating, constantly falling in love with men who humiliate her, renewing her degradations over and over. Worst of all, she cannot love her child any better than she herself was loved. Her memories of childhood beatings are vivid, and she despises violence; yet once, in despair, she throws the infant against a wall. The publication of “A Vindication” makes her famous, but she struggles helplessly to live up to its message: that strength, wisdom and independence are the noblest virtues for women as well as men.
‘Pie crumbs’:As for literary London in the 18th century, the London that so entranced Boswell and Dr. Johnson-Sherwood’s view is a little different from theirs. She sees the underside, the crowds rushing to watch the hanging of a 12-year-old thief, the gutters overflowing with human waste, the children crippled that they might become more successful beggars. “The port was in a tall decanter,” she writes, describing a dinner party of radical intellectuals in a home outfitted with Wedgwood and cut glass. “There was mincemeat pie on the table; a line of ants clustered around the strawberry tarts and pie crumbs on the white cloth. Some mice were running along the baseboards.”
Despite the unremitting muck and the heroine who refuses to act like one, “Vindication” isn’t totally gruesome. There are pleasures and triumphs in Wollstonecraft’s life, and they thread their way quietly through the narrative, especially a profound friendship with her publisher, Joseph Johnson. Thrown out of her job as a governess, Wollstonecraft turns up on his doorstep penniless and bedraggled, hoping that since he has agreed to publish her work he will give her a small advance. Instead he takes her in, asks her to write for the journal he publishes and gives her a home. Sherwood describes this friendship wonderfully, tracing it all over the house, from Wollstonecraft’s attic bedroom-where she writes and suffers-down to the kitchen, where she likes to sit and talk with the housekeeper.
In the end, the tale told in “Vindication” is deeply convincing, not just because Sherwood knows the 18th century but because she knows how to write a novel. It’s as if she has lifted a corner of history and exposed the life beneath, fact and fiction swarming together like the ants about the crumbs. This astonishing first novel exerts a grip on the imagination that can’t be shaken off. Watch out, we may be in for a Wollstonecraft craze to rival the one for Frida Kahlo.
