This is inventive, illuminating, involving biography at its best.Ten years ago, Charlotte Gordon was surprised to discover that Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, both of whom she had heard, were in fact mother and daughter. For the first time, Romantic Outlaws brings together a pair of visionary women who should have shared a life, but who instead share a powerful literary and feminist legacy. Having pushed the boundaries of the literary form, she went on to become the editor of her husband's poetry - a feat of scholarship that established his posthumous reputation. At just nineteen years old, Mary travelled around Italy with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and there wrote Frankenstein. Not only did Wollstonecraft pen the landmark book, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her work ignited Romanticism, inspiring a whole new generation of writers, including her daughter.

Wollstonecraft proclaimed that women's liberty should matter to everyone.

Shelley eloped in a fishing boat with a married man and faced down bandits in Naples. They also broke every rigid convention thrust upon them: Wollstonecraft chased pirates in Scandinavia and sailed to Paris to witness the Revolution. Both Marys became famous writers, fell in love with brilliant but impossible men, and were single mothers out of wedlock both lived in exile, fought for their position in society and thought deeply about how we should live. Nevertheless, their passionate and pioneering lives remained closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies eerily similar. Mary Wollstonecraft and author Mary Shelley were mother and daughter, yet these two extraordinary women never knew one another. Gordon has reunited mother and daughter through biography, beautifully weaving their narratives for the first time.' (Amanda Foreman English feminist). 'A gripping account of the heartbreaks and triumphs of two of history's most formidable female intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.

Print Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary ShelleyĪs Read On BBC Radio 4.

Romantic outlaws