Selina O’Grady
A Life of Experiment
'The personal is the political.’ We all remember this 1970s feminist call to consciousness. But it is perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft – eighteenth-century author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, wife of William Godwin, mother of Mary Shelley – who most embodies this mantra. She put the home at the centre of her doctrines, and her life was governed by the feminist struggle as much as her work was. But public knowledge of her lovers, of the two (rejected) offers she made to live in a ménage à trois, of her single motherhood and of her suicide attempts destroyed her reputation, and it was not until the 1970s that she re-emerged as the mother of feminism.
For Lyndall Gordon, biographer of Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, Wollstonecraft’s genius lies in her life. It was, according to Virginia Woolf, ‘an experiment from the start’. The daughter of a drunken bully, this self-educated companion, teacher and governess set out to become one of the first women to live
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within two days of arriving at the retreat, he is called away to attend the funeral of a friend killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks ... Carrère is soon divorced and suicidal, interned in a psychiatric institution where he must slowly rebuild his life.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lunge-twist-pose
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel
From the First World War to Evelyn Waugh: @DaisyfDunn takes us into the world of Oxford between the wars.
Generously supported by @Lit_Review
#CVHF #AmazingHistory #UniversityofOxford