In Search of Mary Read Online Free Page B

in equal measure. It’s an event at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. The festival is a celebration of the radical London neighbourhood where Wollstonecraft lived and worked, and where happily she now gets her own gig.
    I arrive early, all a-flutter, as the first contributor is preparing for her reading. She has a shawl draped loosely over her shoulders, presumably to channel Mary Wollstonecraft. I look around. The woman on the door also has a shawl, and so does the woman giving out teabags with poetic phrases attached. I inwardly kick myself: why don’t I have a Wollstonecraft shawl? They’re obviously throwing some kind of gang sign.
    The first reader gives a galloping account of Wollstonecraft’s life, then there’s a statue campaign. Then two installation artists talk about their projects, and finally we’re all urged to chatto one another. It’s all a bit earnest, and sparsely attended. I’m torn. On one hand I unreservedly admire the contributors for trying to bring her to new audiences. But on the other, Wollstonecraft deserves so more than this. She deserves a more convincing, a more resounding, a more fabulous, great, big, clanging, sky-rocketing, flame-throwing, heart-bursting memorial. Not a handful of ladies in a warm wooden room.
    Taking advantage of the allotted chat time I approach the person who spoke about Wollstonecraft’s life, and congratulate her. The woman is Roberta Wedge, the Wollstonecraft blogger, and it turns out that she’s something rather special. Emboldened by our joint adventures in adoration, I casually ask if she’d like to have a coffee some time. She says yes, and I leave with a spring in my step. I’m going on a Wollstonecraft date!
    Roberta chooses the place of our meeting: the café inside the towering Gothic splendour of St Pancras station. I rush in with my high-vis bike gear flapping, and she’s already sitting there in a composed, somehow old-fashioned way. It all feels a bit special interest. Roberta’s face is old and young all at once: sweet, with dimples, radiating quaintness – and somehow out of kilter with the world, at least the bustling King’s Cross world outside.
    “Wollstonecraft’s grave is just a few minutes away from here,” says Roberta, and as our coffees arrive, we launch off. The first thing we put to rights is that Wollstonecraft’s memory has been failed, and that a reboot is most definitely in order.
    “What the world needs is
Wollstonecraft: The Movie
,” says Roberta. “What elements of a Hollywood blockbuster does her life not contain? Sex? No problem. Violence? We’ve got theFrench Reign of Terror. What could be more violent? The only thing it doesn’t have is a fast car chase, but I’m sure we could arrange something with the time her stage coach overturns…”
    Roberta used to work in higher education. “Mary has given me a new project, a new life.” I get the sense she almost lives
as
her, or at least through her. She speaks in elegant paragraphs as academics do, but with a “right?” at the end of her sentences, which lessens the feeling of a lecture. It draws me in and makes me feel that we’re in cahoots. I ask what most inspires her about Wollstonecraft.
    “She made her way as a young woman without resources, moving around a lot, living in other people’s spaces, as a governess, as a lady’s companion, and always struggling and striving to the betterment not just of herself but of others around her.” We nod in vigorous agreement. “She knew injustice from her earliest days,” Roberta goes on. “She knew that what her father was doing to her mother was not right, but she didn’t have a framework to put that into. Until she moved to Newington Green, in what is now London. She became part of this village of high-minded anti-establishment Dissenters, who wanted to create a better society. So what’s not to love?”
    Roberta also tweets in the actual person of Wollstonecraft, listening out for people who