Romantic Outlaws

1881, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony published the first volume of their monumental History of Suffrage, they put Wollstonecraft at the top of their list of heroic women “[w]hose earnest lives and fearless words, in demanding political rights for women have been, in the preparation of these pages, a constant inspiration.”

His Calvinist upbringing made the pleasure he experienced almost too much to bear. He needed to appease his guilt at how happy he was and make sure he could do without Mary, at least for a few weeks.

Never having read Frankenstein, he did not realize that this plan actually duplicated Mary’s depiction of the monster’s wishes for his own funeral: to be burned, with his ashes “swept into the seas by the winds.”

The two great poets had inflicted unspeakable pain, she believed, all in the name of freedom and passion.

The originality of Mary’s stance is that it gave women entry into the hallowed hallways of literature, precisely because they had not received a classical education. Women’s lack of book learning, far from being a disadvantage, freed them to be closer to Nature.

Those who are bold enough to advance before the age they live in, and to throw off, by the force of their own minds, the prejudices which the maturing reason of the world will in time disavow, must learn to brave censure. We ought not to be too anxious respecting the opinion of others.

He would respect her right to work; she would respect his.

They relied on the birth control system of the time: no sex for three days after menstruation, and then, since everyone believed that frequent intercourse lowered the possibility of conception, a lot of sex for the rest of the month.

She had not lost interest in politics and current events; it was just that she was now fascinated by the interior life, the reasons and feelings behind people’s actions—why they did what they did.