On Writing Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft

I know the look by now. You tell someone you’ve just written a book about Mary Wollstonecraft. Their eyes light up but then there’s a flicker of self-doubt. “Not the daughter,” I jump in, “The mother. In fact, not just the mother of Mary Shelley, but feminism itself!” 

I know the look because I did it too. Love and Fury was conceived during the 200th anniversary year of Frankenstein, when Mary Shelley was everywhere. My lovely English agent and I were throwing around ideas for what I’d write next. “What about Wollstonecraft?” she said, and I had that momentary shiver of wondering which Wollstonecraft she meant. We Americans know Shelley — born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30th, 1797 — but few of us know that her birthday marks the beginning of her mother’s slow death from puerperal fever eleven days later, a loss that would haunt Mary Shelley through her life.

The great, original Mary Wollstonecraft was lost to her, and to us, just as she was inhabiting the fullness of her power to radically alter the rights of women. And so my obsession, like the writing of any novel must be, began.

It began with missteps and false starts. I didn’t know how to encapsulate the broad swath of Wollstonecraft’s astonishing life against the backdrop of the revolutionary late 18th century, how to locate the human scale version of the feminist icon and avatar, find the moments that formed her, animated her genius. She’d risked everything to be “the first of a new genus,” a fiercely independent woman writer and thinker who said what she thought, loved whom she desired (without marriage), traveled where she wanted to, fought against the tyranny of marriage and kings, and gender norms, in her life and her work.

She paid for it over and over, with her mental health, her reputation, and her legacy, destroyed unintentionally by her husband, William Godwin, whose tell-all memoir after her premature death scandalized nearly everyone. How could I do that Wollstonecraft justice, give her a body, put words in her mouth, find her voice, and mine in hers? 

It seemed a dauntingly daring enterprise, and there I was, intimidated by my own subject. We novelists look for a way in, a secret door, a key that unlocks the gate to the hidden place. Having cut my teeth as a screenwriter, I had tricks. Out came the butcher paper, the post-it notes, but I needed a frame, a structure – the hooks to hang the bolt of raw silk that was her difficult and extraordinary life. 

Enter Mary Shelley, stage right. Having just read Stegner’s Angle of Repose, I thought the obvious path was to find Wollstonecraft through the lens of the daughter, let’s say an unexpected trunk of her mother’s letters delivered to her, coincidentally, on the night at Villa Diodati in Switzerland that she begins her famed tale of the creature abandoned by its creator, a child left by its parent. The daughter would be the key to the hidden place.

“Tonight I gave birth to a monster,” my Shelley would write.   

I gave the obviously brilliant first chapter to my editor, who told me in her gentle way, try again. Everyone knows Shelley, she said, not so Wollstonecraft. She was right. I was hiding behind Shelley’s skirts, hoping readers would go on the ride with me because they knew Shelley and her Frankenstein. I needed to let Wollstonecraft live and breathe on her own, in her own right. Trust that I could find the electrical spark to make her come alive. 

So you throw it all out, begin again. You look at the butcher paper, the post-it notes, and think, how do I pinpoint the moments that alter her trajectory? A big believer in the idea that you know a character by putting them under pressure and watching them make choices, I think writers are the same. We are under pressure; we have to choose.

Enter Mary Shelley, stage left. 

I don’t remember when I saw it, that the eleven days between the birth of baby Mary Shelley and the death of Wollstonecraft would be the structure of the novel, but there it was. It would be Shelley’s birth that would incite the novel, and that brief and urgent intersection of their two lives that would drive it. It would force me to choose the eleven most essential stories from Wollstonecraft’s life – one for each of their days together – the ones she wants her daughter to know as she lays dying: This is who I am, what made me, why I believe what I do, and did what I did. 

From that letting go of the daughter, Wollstonecraft came into clear view. The wrong first chapter led me to the right one. I know now that it wasn’t Mary Shelley writing it, but me, the writer, telling the why and the way of the novel before I was conscious of it myself.

“I have her name in mine, if I could but live up to it. A name that rips across my heart like a knife, a shield, an epitaph, a kiss,” my Shelley wrote. “I look for her everywhere. If she is lost to me, I am sworn to find her. If I am lost, I am sworn the same. And so, I close my eyes and wait for her to tell her tale, because here we are now. And I must, finally, know. Where does my mother end, and I begin? Where does my mother begin?”    

—
Samantha Silva is an author and screenwriter based in Idaho. She’s sold film projects to Paramount, Universal, and New Line Cinema. Her debut novel, Mr. Dickens and His Carol, was published by Flatiron Books in 2017, followed by Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft in May 2021. Her essays have appeared on LitHub, and a short story, “Leo in Venice,” appeared in One Story. She is currently working on a commission from Seattle Repertory Theater to adapt Mr. Dickens and His Carol for the stage, and was a 2020 Idaho Commission on the Arts Literary Fellow.

Find out more about Samantha on her website https://www.samanthasilvawriter.com/

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/samantharella

A Best Novel of Summer (New York Times Book Review)

From the acclaimed author of Mr. Dickens and His Carol, a richly-imagined reckoning with the life of another cherished literary legend: Mary Wollstonecraft – arguably the world’s first feminist

August, 1797. Midwife Parthenia Blenkinsop has delivered countless babies, but nothing prepares her for the experience that unfolds when she arrives at Mary Wollstonecraft’s door. Over the eleven harrowing days that follow, as Mrs. Blenkinsop fights for the survival of both mother and newborn, Wollstonecraft recounts the life she dared to live amidst the impossible constraints and prejudices of the late 18th century, rejecting the tyranny of men and marriage, risking everything to demand equality for herself and all women.

She weaves her riveting tale to give her fragile daughter a reason to live, even as her own strength wanes. Wollstonecraft’s urgent story of loss and triumph forms the heartbreakingly brief intersection between the lives of a mother and daughter who will change the arc of history and thought.

In radiant prose, Samantha Silva delivers an ode to the dazzling life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the world’s most influential thinkers and mother of the famous novelist Mary Shelley. But at its heart, Love and Fury is a story about the power of a woman reclaiming her own narrative to pass on to her daughter, and all daughters, for generations to come.

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