The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin

This book was a gift for my 20th birthday and one that I picked for myself. I had heard the name Mary Wollstonecraft come up a lot in my university lectures and readings and she stood out because she was usually the only woman! I knew little about Mary when I first started the biography other than her being the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women. You might be forgiven for thinking 'isn't that enough?', but I soon found that there was so much more to her than that. 

I was struck instantly by how special Wollstonecraft appeared at such a young age. The book began by offering the reader some background of Mary's family instead of starting at her birth. Tomalin followed a chronological structure throughout the book which really helped to give a sense of Mary's change and development throughout her life. I got to see the growth of her republican views and feminism and really felt as though I got to know her character. 

Tomalin's writing was lively and evocative and her footnotes offered good points of information. At times the focus strayed from Mary to other people she encountered in her life and although the digressions were uselful they quite often went on for too long to the point where I'd forgotten why they were relevant in the first place. Another issue with the writing that I found was that a lot of the primary sources that Tomalin uses are French and were not translated, not even in the footnotes. I might have been able to glean some meaning if it had been only a few lines, but at times whole letter were included. 

All things considered, these are only minor points of annoyance as they generally the book was very good and very well written. It enabled me to see Mary Wollstonecraft as the woman she was. Tomalin's book showed her as a human being, faults and all and for me this was far more extraordinary than the symbol she is often presented as. This book is a wonderful illustration not only of Mary, but also of the revolutionary times she lived in.

Rating: ★★★★★

Persephone Books

I stumbled across Persephone Books when watching a book haul video on YouTube and absolutely loved the idea. Persephone Books are dedicated to publishing neglected and forgotten a stories and non-fiction works from the 20th century. They focus on mainly women writers with stories mostly about the domestic sphere and so are very much in line with what I like to read. 

I ordered a copy of their catalogue which in my copy has 104 books, but they have just added 3 more titles! I read through the catalogue and found that they have some of the most interesting books that I have ever come across. If I could have known about Persephone Books when I was researching my dissertation I would have been spoiled for choice on primary texts.

The books are a little more expensive than the average paperback with them being £12 each. Having said that, the copies themselves are a thing of beauty with high quality stories printed on high quality paper and finished with individually sourced endpapers just to make them that extra bit special.

If you want to learn more about Persephone Books to to order their catalogue just click here. 

Happy International Women's Day 2014

In celebration of International Women's Day today and for the rest of March I have decided to do a blog post that explores the relationship between the books that I read and my feminist beliefs. The first thing to do then is to explain what it is I mean when I say feminism. 

This is a lot more difficult than I first realised as I came to write this up because previously my definition has consisted of the simple notion of someone who believes that all genders are equal. It was only when I began to elaborate that I realised that this was not in fact that simple after all.  

I believe that feminism must be intersectional. That is to say that it must recognise, appreciate and even support other types of oppression. This led on from a conversation that I had with a friend last year where I discovered that she is in favour of women’s rights and LGBT rights, but refused to acknowledge middle-class privilege and the oppression of the working class. This was very unsettling for me because up until this point I had assumed that feminists were socialists. However, after a superficial look at the different forms of feminism I came to see that actually there were many different types of feminist who disagree with me on many different issues and actually ‘feminism’ seems to be an umbrella term for anything to do with the appreciation and respect of women. This is absolutely right! 

Despite this, however, I feel that it does not go far enough. Putting aside my belief that gender itself is a construct and completely and utterly arbitrary, my views on equality are also something that need to be further explored in order to truly understand how it is that I define ‘feminism’. The relevance of the following questions has never been so important: equal to what, equal how and equal to whom? This is where the intersectional aspect of feminism comes back into play because working-class women, black women and non-Western women (to name a few) do not have the same experiences of womanhood. Therefore, what I mean by ‘equal’ cannot simply mean the same rights and privileges as men because what kind of ‘man’ are we talking about? White men? British men? Gay men? All of these? None of these? Feminism for many may mean the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men, but for me it means the eradication of privilege.


What impact does this then have on my relationship with books?

• I take an interest in books about women and female protagonists. 

• I actively choose to read women authors, particularly LGBT women, women of colour and the Global South.

• I struggle to connect with male-centric narratives.

• I look for and enjoy books explicitly about feminism. 

• I can struggle with power relationships in romantic comedy and romance novels and especially contemporary New Adult novels. 

• How feminist-friendly a book is can fundamentally impact how much I enjoy it. 

• The feminist credentials of an author can bump a book up on my wish list. 

Many people might say that this means that I am in fact discriminating against male authors and male protagonists, but I reject this because I believe that the literary world (and the world) are already in favour of men and uses them as the default. As a result of this it is easy for people to in their reading habits to bypass books about and by women. Looking back on the majority of my compulsory reading throughout my education, even at university it is clear patriarchy still prevails. It is not my intention to never again read a book written by a man (men can be feminists too!), but to find a sense of equality in what it is that I do read.