Claire Tomalin wrote her first biography in 1974. It was - no surprise - on Mary Wollstonecraft. Before that, she'd been a literary editor, but her success with The Life and Death of propelled her into a new career. She'll be giving a series of five lectures at the London Literature Festival this year on several of her subjects (Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, etc.), concluding on 3 June with our heroine.
Claire Tomalin concludes her five-part lecture series in the week of the Women's Prize for Fiction with a study of one of the great voices of the Enlightenment - Mary Wollstonecroft.
Wollstonecroft died in childbirth in 1797 at the age 38, but in her short life she fired the opening shots in the long battle for sexual equality.
Her 'Vindication of the Rights of Woman' made her famous throughout Europe. Her support of the ideas behind the French Revolution took her to Paris to see it in action.
In her professional life as a journalist and writer, and in her turbulent private life, she laid out a pattern of difficulties, triumphs and sorrows that every modern working woman can recognise.Such a difficult name to spell. The title contains the same error, which means anyone searching through the database risks being stymied by software telling them that there are no events about Mary Wollstonecraft.
Tickets can be purchased here. I hope you have better luck with the South Bank computers than I did, when I was trying to plan my time at the Women of the World weekend. Good thing the launch of Fifty Shades of Feminism was in an unticketed space.
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