After four years of reviewing biographical novels in Herstory Revisited, I'm delighted to finally discuss my own work of historical fiction. This month Black Rose Writing is publishing Solitary Walker: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft. (Pub day: February 20)
Solitary Walker covers a decade in the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th century British writer and philosopher who challenged conventional norms and beliefs about women's role in society.
Why Mary Wollstonecraft as the subject of my first novel? The choice was easy. I wanted to write the kind of story I like to read, stories about women who pushed against what was wrong and tried to make the world right.
By using her pen as her instrument of persuasion, Mary Wollstonecraft demanded girls enjoy the same rigorous curriculum as boys. She also lobbied society to grant women greater independence.
Mary's ideas were considered quite radical at the time. In 1792, women were regarded as little more than property, subject to their father's or husband's complete control. Because of Mary Wollstonecraft, all that began to change ...
The Plot
Solitary Walker opens with a short prologue in which readers meet twelve-year-old Mary guarding her mother's bedroom door late at night. Mary's father, a brute of a man, abuses his wife and children. Mary intends to stop him. At the end of the prologue, Mary swears she'll never submit to a man's control. That includes never marrying. To her, men are dangerous.
Fast forward in Chapter One to sixteen years later when Mary is 28, working as a governess to the three eldest daughters of Lord and Lady Kingsborough, the richest family in Ireland. The Kings are summering in Bristol, England, at Hotwells Spa, "taking the waters" for their health.
A sudden turn occurs for Mary in Chapter One, and days later, she finds herself in London. A hackney cab unceremoniously drops her off in St. Paul's Churchard.
The stranger’s departure left Mary feeling alone despite streams of people walking to and fro. Her spirits had grown depressed over the more than one hundred miles she had traveled from Bristol. Had she been wise to come all this way when a parcel with a note would have been sufficient? She could not falter now. The foul stink of the Thames a block away reminded her how, in one small turn, life could rot. When she spotted St. Paul’s Cathedral across the way, she prayed for more luck than life had thus far granted her.
Yet Mary is hopeful as well. She has come to London with one purpose in mind. Besides being a governess, for the last decade she has worked as a lady's companion, a teacher, and as headmistress at a school she opened for girls. But she is sick of working for the wealthy, whom she finds shallow and selfish. She intends to make her own way in the world as a writer.
She turned then, and there it was, No. 72, an odd-shaped corner affair, narrow at the front, wide at the back, the kind of building she imagined had stories to tell and secrets to keep. Books for sale displayed in the front window fanned the flames of discontent that had delivered her to London. Someday, volumes of her own work would sit alongside them.
Solitary Walker takes readers through Mary's unlikely rise as a writer in London, then to Paris, where she writes about the French Revolution, and later, a solo journey through Scandinavia in search of missing cargo. As much as Mary believes she wants only to be a spinster, deep inside, she longs for love and intimacy. Disaster eventually courts. When it does, Mary must decide what being a woman really means to her.
The above painting captures what Mary would have seen in London in 1787. She often crossed the Thames by way of Blackfriars Bridge on her way to St. Paul's Churchyard to visit her publisher.
So Who Was the Real Mary Wollstonecraft?
Although fictionalized, Solitary Walker stems directly from the true story of Mary Wollstonecraft's life. To understand her, I dedicated several years to research, using the biographies, collected letters, and memoirs pictured here. The degree to which biographers differed in their interpretations of Mary, including timelines, dates, and spellings, surprised me. Eventually, I had to choose which details to incorporate.
Mary was such an interesting character that my first draft was 200K words, the equivalent of two books! I wanted to include everything I'd learned about this fascinating woman. Rookie mistake. I knew no publisher was going to take on an 800-page book by a debut writer.
So I spent the next several years reducing the manuscript to the standard book length of approximately 100K words. It took time. Cutting my word count dramatically changed the story I had set out to tell. Instead of writing about Mary's entire life, I settled on the period encompassing her writing career and what I call her ill-fated forays into love.
Solitary Walker is not a romance novel, though there is romance in it. Mary was a smart woman who sometimes made foolish choices, especially when it came to men. Modern women will likely see themselves or their friends in Mary, recognizing her missteps and hopefully understanding some of the ill-considered things she did. Mary didn't have a mother who helped her develop intuition regarding love and sex or how to identify men likely to deceive her. In this regard, Mary was terribly naive.
She had better instincts about how to make it in a man's world after watching her unscrupulous father in action. She developed a bold spirit, willing to rebel against rules dictating a woman's behavior, just as she had rebelled against her father. She was a free spirit with a brilliant mind to match, at odds with England's controlling patriarchy.
However, Mary did not emerge unscathed from childhood and suffered bouts of depression throughout her life. Twice she tried to commit suicide. Being a recipient of her father's physical and mental abuse, and knowing of his vicious sexual assaults on Mary's mother, likely left an indelible mark on Mary. It no doubt influenced her attitudes toward men. No wonder Mary didn't trust the institution of marriage. She saw her mother as a woman trapped in a horrible existence.
Whom Mary did trust were the men who became her mentors, men who unlocked their libraries, vastly enabling her to expand her knowledge. From them, Mary received an education close to rivaling that of boys her age. They introduced her to the Enlightenment Era's greatest thinkers. John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire were but a few of the famous philosophers who would influence the political ideals germinating in Mary.
She had a gift with words as well. A precocious girl who naturally possessed excellent conversational skills, she gained entry into important intellectual circles as she grew into womanhood, progressive thinkers who would help shape her revolutionary views. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Mary was all in, hoping it would sprout democracies across Europe.
I won't share more about Mary's biographical details here, for to do so would give away too much of Solitary Walker's plot if you're not already aware of her history. The novel closely follows the historical record, even though I take the occasional liberty with timelines to serve the story. Biofiction is, after all, just that. Fiction. What are imagined are Mary's feelings and conversations I envisioned as the result of my research. All but a handful of characters are based on actual figures.
A Sneak Preview
To give you a sneak preview of who shows up early in the novel, allow me to introduce you to a few key players.
Joseph Johnson: Mary's publisher. Had the insightful Joseph Johnson not recognized Mary's potential as a writer, Mary might have died an obscure bluestocking. When Mary's friend the Reverend John Hewlett presented a book proposal on behalf of Mary to Johnson, he bought it immediately, saying he'd publish anything else she wrote.
In Solitary Walker, when Mary arrives in London, he invites her to stay with him until he can find her a house to rent. Days later, Johnson hosts one of his weekly dinners for which he was legendary.
In real life, each week Johnson invited friends to "dine at three" and fed them simple fare like cod or pease soup. Wine, ale, and other spirits flowed. His guests were London's heavy hitters, some of whom would help launch the Romantic Era. William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and even America's beloved Benjamin Franklin dined at Johnson's table. Women attended his dinners as well. Besides Mary, novelist Maria Edgeworth, poet Anna Barbauld, and children's writer Sarah Trimmer were occasional guests, but it was mostly a male crowd.
Thomas Holcroft: playwright, poet, and novelist. In the novel, Holcroft is one of the first individuals to welcome Mary to London. He's a regular at Johnson's weekly dinners and is eager to show Mary all of what London offers. When she demures at his invitation to join him at a play showing at the Haymarket Theater, he encourages her to ignore society's rules about chaperones for ladies. How else will a single woman enjoy city life?
Also making an early entrance in the novel is The Nightmare, a painting by Johnson's friend Henry Fuseli. An earlier version of the painting above hung in Johnson's dining room. Below is a passage in which Mary first sees it in Johnson's dining room.
When she met Mr. Johnson for breakfast at ten, an incubus—a demon—in a painting looming over the table in Mr. Johnson’s dining room greeted her. The image caused her to shift in her seat. In the painting, draped over the side of a bed, was a woman sleeping, her hair and arms spilling to the floor. Not only did she appear drugged; the incubus crouched upon her torso, staring at the viewer. According to Germanic legend, an incubus laid itself upon a sleeping woman when desirous of having sex with her. Mary wondered, had she made the right decision to stay with Mr. Johnson, or did he entertain certain … odd proclivities?
“An early rendition of The Nightmare,” Mr. Johnson said, meaning the painting. If he thought Mary might find its subject matter offensive, he gave no indication.
Mary considers the mild, unassuming Mr. Johnson as he absently eats his porridge. He is in his fifties, has never married, and has always presented himself as the picture of decorum. She quickly decides he is too kind a man to pose any threat to her. The Nightmare, on the other hand ...
You'll have to read the book to find out what Mary really thinks about the painting, which serves as a recurring motif throughout the novel. And about the artist, Henry Fuseli, another regular at Johnson's dinners.
I encourage you to purchase Solitary Walker at any of the links at the end of this post, or ask your public library to order it. Better yet, ask the library to order a set for book clubs. Solitary Walker is the perfect book club pick.
Does Mary Wollstonecraft Matter in the 21st Century?
"I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves," Mary wrote in 1792 when she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her most famous political treatise. Abigail Adams, a contemporary of hers across the pond, read and applauded what Mary had to say. John Adams, not so much. He read Mary's polemical works as well and was of the opinion she was far too radical.
Too bad, John. Mary's words would go down in history and inspire American women in the 19th century who began the long march toward women's suffrage. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott all read and admired Mary. Margaret Fuller, America's closest version of Mary, would look to her writing when styling her own philosophy about the role of women in society in her book Woman in the 19th Century in 1845. Her words similarly influenced women around the world. It's no wonder historians widely consider Mary Wollstonecraft the mother of feminism.
I'd like to think Mary inspires us today still, especially now, when women's rights feel under threat worldwide. Why would we ever allow ourselves to succumb to a patriarchy that would be content to keep women at home and pregnant? Mary Wollstonecraft tells us why. It's because keeping women as the second-class sex diminishes women. But by diminishing women, we diminish all of society. Interestingly, in the current political climate, both ends of the political spectrum claim Mary as a historic figure supporting their views regarding women and other marginalized groups, surely a sign of Mary’s enduring greatness.
Mary wasn't perfect, and Solitary Walker isn't so much about Mary's writing or her political views as much as it's the story of Mary as a woman, who, like all of us, pursued her dreams and ambitions with varying degrees of upset and success. She had her flaws, which make her relatable. In fact, her flaws are what I love most about her. Even when she made mistakes, she got back up again. "The beginning is always today," she said, and I believe her.
Thanks for reading. I'm glad you're here. Before leaving, check out the video book trailer I prepared for you. Enjoy!
N.J. (Nancy) Mastro
Solitary Walker: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft is available in paperback and ebook at the following online bookstores:
Bookshop.org (affiliate link)
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