5/23/2023 0 Comments WollstonecraftUnexpected events had brought me graveside: when I was thirty-two, my fifty-seven-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I was frequently surprised by my emotions, by the things I suddenly needed to do or say that surged up out of nowhere. Died 10th September, 1797.” I didn’t tell him why I wanted to go there I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand, and I often felt so lost that I didn’t want to talk to real people, people I wanted to love me rather than pity me, people I didn’t want to scare. “Author of A Vindication of the rights of Woman. “MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,” the stone reads. I first visited at thirty-four, newly separated, on a cold gray day with a lover, daffodils rising around the squat cubic pillar. When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, at university, and I knew Saint Pancras Churchyard was where Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also Mary, had taken the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when they were falling in love. I’d known it was there, behind King’s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. Public domain.Īround the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. Detail from John Opie’s portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1790–1.
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