At 18, Wollstonecraft began a romantic friendship with tubercular artist Fanny Blood, but Fanny married for financial security and died in childbirth. John Arden, father of her friend Jane, recognized Wollstonecraft’s intelligence and tutored her until Jane began to find Wollstonecraft too unconventional (and needy) to continue their friendship-also a pattern in Wollstonecraft’s life despite her intellectual emphasis on independence and feminine self-reliance in her writings. Her reprobate father made her childhood a misery, she remembers, but, already rebellious and brilliant, she had a knack for drawing others to her. Wollstonecraft died at 38, days after having given birth to Mary, her second daughter, and Silva frames the novel as the dying woman's recounting of her life story to her infant. A fictionalized biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering 18th-century feminist and radical thinker who was the mother of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.
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