In Search of Mary Read Online Free Page A

radiates hugely in my life. I think about the dimples in his arms and sense the win-win: if I never get this thing done, I will still have him.
    The trip is now happening. I’ve told everyone and spent many stolen hours setting it up, so it must. Luckily my day job at the World Service is freelance these days, and therefore flexible. Families, however, don’t share this quality, and I have to keep finding new hiding places to get stuff done. We’re due to set off in two weeks. My lists of instructions, advice, emergency numbers and school contacts are getting borderline freaky. Both Justin and Nori, our part-time nanny, repeatedly assure me that everyone will somehow cope.
    While I cavort with baby Will, who is masquerading as Wollstonecraft’s baby Frances, we leave behind Will’s three sisters, Eva, Zola and Elsa, and their increasingly complicated social lives. The travel plans are squeezed around them: we’ll be leaving after Elsa’s assembly, and getting back just before Eva’s birthday. I point this out loudly and often, to make myself seem less selfish. No one is remotely bothered.
    We hit an early logistics problem. In the interests of authenticity we must approach Norway from the sea, as Wollstone-craft did. But there are no longer any ferries to Norway from the UK. So Will and I must fly into neighbouring Sweden, then catch a ferry that’s 165 kilometres away. Between the plane landing and the ferry setting sail we have roughly six hours. But there’s no direct connection, and the combination of buses and trains adds up to over five hours.
    I’m conveying this in relentless detail to a friend. She looks at me, then says she wouldn’t really be interested in reading a book about a woman with a baby missing a bus. “It’s not exactly
Touching the Void
, is it Bee?” No, maybe not. But for the record, the
Touching the Void
bloke may have broken most of his bones, but did he do it carrying a ten-month-old baby who smells of poo – poo that may well have squeezed out into several layers of clothing? No, he did not. So give it a rest with the “me and my broken bones”, thank you.
    What is it with mountains anyway? I’ve always been a bit taken aback by the part in the
Vindication
where Wollstone-craft concedes that the greatest public works have proceeded from unmarried and childless men and women. But, she adds:
    The welfare of society is not built upon extra-ordinary exertions; and were it more reasonably organized, there would be still less need of great abilities, or heroic virtues.
    Which I choose to read as follows: instead of conquering something very very big, how about: get the kettle on, then conquer half a million small things. Like most of us do, most days.
    Why isn’t Mary Wollstonecraft as famous as she ought to be? She has a habit of attracting eccentrics and boffins, historians and feminist theorists. Tantalizing company no doubt, but she deserves a much wider fan base. Look how everyone adores her near-contemporary, Jane Austen. They’re choosing the view into a tidy garden over one onto a crashing sea. Have courage,readers! That Woolf again: “If Jane Austen had lain as a child on the landing to prevent her father from thrashing her mother [as Wollstonecraft did], her soul might have burned with such a passion against tyranny that all her novels might have been consumed in one cry for justice.”
    And then there’s her daughter, who wrote one of the most enduring novels of all time. Yes, a lot of people don’t know that Mary Wollstonecraft, on top of everything else, is
Frank-enstein
’s granny. Yet despite everything she has remained in the cobwebby shadows, rarely visible – and regularly misspelt. The biographies of her are magnificent, but they’re mainly for people who read magnificent biographies. How to rescue her from the dust? Would a few mirror lights and a glitter-ball help get the
Vindication
out there?
    My very first Mariac encounter gives me inspiration and doubt