Who doesn’t love a literary novel about fierce feminist writers? Her Lost Words chronicles the lives of mother and daughter authors Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.

Words have the power to transform us, Mary. They can lift us from our grief. The ideas they form can even offer humanity the hope for the future,

Teenage Wollstonecraft fled her violent father’s home in 1775 and was taken in by a reverend’s family who encouraged her love of reading and helped her find a life for herself with a job as a governess. She became one of the founding feminist philosophers with her book A Vindication of the Rights of Women in which she proposed that women were equal to men. Vindication was a trailblazing feminist text.

Mary did know, she’d learned from Claire—who had heard it from her mother—that Mary Wollstonecraft’s life had scandalized society to the point where the entry for prostitution in the conservative publication The Anti-Jacobin Review read “see: Mary Wollstonecraft.”

An independent woman who never bowed to conventions, Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to her daughter, Mary. Mary Shelley grew up in the shadow of her mother. Even her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she met at a dinner party and then eloped with, first confessed to being a fan of her mother’s writings.

Knowledge is the fairest fruit and the food of joy. You must never forget that. And you must swear a solemn oath that you will never stop reading, or learning, or sharing that knowledge, like the philosophers of old.

Her Lost Words is a historical fiction novel based on the real lives of women who went against the grain and forged their own paths. The story spans England, France during the revolution, Switzerland and Italy. It tells of their loves and loves lost, their relationships with one another and the world around them at at time when women were on the cusp of changing the world and its relationship to them. A touching and inspiring tribute to two literary women of history.

This is a love letter to two brilliant women who lit the way for not just women writers, but all women.

authors note