Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelle

‘Romantic Outlaws’ tells the story of the passionate and pioneering lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, English feminist and author of the landmark book, ‘The Vindication of the Rights of Women’, and her novelist daughter Mary Shelley, author of ‘Frankenstein’. Although mother and daughter, these two women never knew one another, Wollstonecraft died of an infection in 1797 at the age of 38, a week after giving birth. Nevertheless their lives were so closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies so eerily similar, it seems impossible to consider one without the other. Both women became famous writers; fell in love with brilliant but impossible men; and were single mothers who had children out of wedlock; both lived in exile; fought for their position in society; and thought deeply about how we should live. And both women broke almost every rigid convention there was to break.