Love and Fury

From the acclaimed author of Mr. Dickens and His Carol, a richly-imagined reckoning with the life of another cherished literary legend: Mary Wollstonecraft – arguably the world’s first feminist.

August, 1797. Midwife Parthenia Blenkinsop has delivered countless babies, but nothing prepares her for the experience that unfolds when she arrives at Mary Wollstonecraft’s door. Over the eleven harrowing days that follow, as Mrs. Blenkinsop fights for the survival of both mother and newborn, Mary Wollstonecraft recounts the life she dared to live amidst the impossible constraints and prejudices of the late 18th century, rejecting the tyranny of men and marriage, risking everything to demand equality for herself and all women. She weaves her riveting tale to give her fragile daughter a reason to live, even as her own strength wanes. Wollstonecraft’s urgent story of loss and triumph forms the heartbreakingly brief intersection between the lives of a mother and daughter who will change the arc of history and thought.

In radiant prose, Samantha Silva delivers an ode to the dazzling life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the world's most influential thinkers and mother of the famous novelist Mary Shelley. But at its heart, Love and Fury is a story about the power of a woman reclaiming her own narrative to pass on to her daughter, and all daughters, for generations to come.

This discussion guide and recommended reading was shared and sponsored in partnership with Flatiron Books.

Book club questions for Love and Fury by Samantha Silva

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

How do both love and fury shape the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mrs. Blenkinsop? What do those words mean to you?

Love and Fury alternates between third-person narration from Mrs. Blenkinsop’s perspective and first-person narration from Mary’s. What is the effect of moving back and forth between these two strands? How do they inform each other?

Mary’s chapters are narrated directly to her daughter. As she says: “I will tell you the story to fill you up and bind you to this wondrous vale, if you stay with us, little bird. Please stay. I will tell you the moments that begin and end me—because we are made of them all, strung like pearls in time, searching always for where the new circle begins its turn, the place of our next becoming. Where the line becomes an arc, and curves.” What does she mean? Do you agree with her description of life as a series of moments “strung like pearls in time”?

When Mary is a child, she describes nature as “my only home on earth, a place to rest, unbound.” What role does nature play throughout her life? How do her views evolve as she gets older?

Mary tells Jane Arden: “I am singular in my thoughts of love and friendship…I must have the first place with you or none.” What does Mary’s relationship with Jane mean to her? How does it foreshadow future relationships, notably with Fanny Blood and Imlay?

In one of their last conversations, John Arden tells Mary: “Yet cut open a burl, Miss Wollstonecraft, and instead of straight grain one finds waves and swirls of wood, marbled and feathered, even ‘eyes’ staring back at us. It’s the most prized wood, above everything…Our knots are the strongest part of us. And our burls the place of our greatest beauty, if we but grow up around them, and reach for the sun.” What are some of the “knots” that shape Mary’s life?

Mary describes Fanny Blood as the person she loved most in the world, after her daughters. What does Fanny mean to her? Would you describe their relationship as romantic?

Discuss Mary’s philosophy on the education of young women and girls: “Integrity, creativity, self-discipline. If they could learn to value their own minds, not the minds of others, of men, they might refuse trivialities in favor of depth, and true human purpose, a new society, made by them, reflected in them. That, I believe, is the highest virtue.” What does she mean? What is the importance of education over the course of Mary’s life?

Do you sympathize at all with Lady Kingsborough? In what ways does she embody the difficulties women faced in the eighteenth century, despite their wealth and position?

Mary reflects: “I seek a poetics of change. For women and men. That joins sense with sensibility. But a sensibility governed by reason.” Later in the novel, Mrs. Blenkinsop remarks on “the way [Mary] turns feeling into thinking and thinking into feeling.” What do sense and sensibility mean in the context of this novel? How are they related to feeling and thinking, in particular?

Mary tells Fuseli: “I don’t want women to have power over men, but power, at last, over themselves.” What does power mean to her? Discuss instances in the novel where she has power over her life, and when she doesn’t.

The first words Mary writes in crafting A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arguably her most famous work, are: “A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society.” What do you think she means by that? How does it shape her approach to life and relationships?

Love and Fury Book Club Questions PDF

Click here for a printable PDF of the Love and Fury discussion questions

“Love and Fury sparks with a thrilling jolt of electricity, reanimating the epic legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft. A spun-gold tale both sweeping and intimate, Love and Fury shines with essential truths about love, womanhood, and the timeless struggle to define one’s self.”—Afia Atakora, author of Conjure Women

“Astonishing and groundbreaking. Silva’s Wollstonecraft is one of the most complex and endearing characters in recent historical fiction, simultaneously strong and heartbreakingly vulnerable. Love and Fury chronicles not only a great historical figure but, just as movingly, a woman, wife, and mother who learns to find love and home within herself.”—Natalie Jenner, author of The Jane Austen Society

“Intensely moving. Silva's writing is as fearless as its subject. Love and Fury is like watching newly-colorized archive film burst into life—I knew the story, but I never knew the story like this.”—Bee Rowlatt, author of In Search of Mary

“Here is a novel set on the border between living and dying, with a heroine so powerful she conquers all territories—and she conquered me, too. Love and Fury thrums with beauty, pain, sorrow, wonder, tragedy, triumph, and life. What an extraordinary and transformative book this is.”—Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson

“Gorgeous. Silva has given homage and light to Mary Wollstonecraft, creating a complex and loving novel all her own. This illuminating story harnesses the power women have—even in the midst of loss—to change the world, one woman's story at a time. An urgent masterpiece.”—TaraShea Nesbit, author of Beheld