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Reviews tagging 'Misogyny'
Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle by Janet Todd
1 review
henrygravesprince's review
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.0
Part of why this review has taken me so long to write after finishing this book is the fact that I’ve been trying to parse how to go about framing my opinions here. There’s no question that Janet Todd, the author, has done a lot of significant work in preserving and sharing Mary Wollstonecraft’s legacy, as well as important work for Shelleyan scholarship in general, and I don’t want to downplay that. I also would be wrong to ignore how significant it is that Todd is, as of now, the only person to write extensively on Fanny Godwin, and one of the few to touch more on Harriet Westbrook’s life and untimely death.
The edition I read had quite a few grammatical errors, particularly with punctuation; chances are those may have been an error of production (or of digitization) rather than of the author, which is unfortunate, but they happened often enough to grate on me.
Overall, I think it’s the writing style that just doesn’t jive with me. A lot of the gaps within the narrative of Fanny’s life have to be filled by speculation, but that causes a lot of insertion of authorial biases and potential historical misunderstandings. There are moments where it feels like the author’s own contempt for certain people in Fanny’s life is pushed more than any explanation of that — I don’t expect nonfiction to be soulless and without opinion, but I do wish that the book was clearer on those biases or at least dove moreso into those opinions if they needed to be included. There were parts where it felt like the author had a grudge against Mary Shelley, especially when touching on Mary’s teenage antics and mistakes, occasionally paired with small but irksome inaccuracies about Mary’s life & future being nestled in there.
There’s also just a strange amount of fatphobia in this book. If there’s an opportunity to mention someone’s weight, even tangential historical figures such as French kings, it is taken, and it is usually very cruelly done. It’s deeply out of place & kind of baffling.
The edition I read had quite a few grammatical errors, particularly with punctuation; chances are those may have been an error of production (or of digitization) rather than of the author, which is unfortunate, but they happened often enough to grate on me.
Overall, I think it’s the writing style that just doesn’t jive with me. A lot of the gaps within the narrative of Fanny’s life have to be filled by speculation, but that causes a lot of insertion of authorial biases and potential historical misunderstandings. There are moments where it feels like the author’s own contempt for certain people in Fanny’s life is pushed more than any explanation of that — I don’t expect nonfiction to be soulless and without opinion, but I do wish that the book was clearer on those biases or at least dove moreso into those opinions if they needed to be included. There were parts where it felt like the author had a grudge against Mary Shelley, especially when touching on Mary’s teenage antics and mistakes, occasionally paired with small but irksome inaccuracies about Mary’s life & future being nestled in there.
There’s also just a strange amount of fatphobia in this book. If there’s an opportunity to mention someone’s weight, even tangential historical figures such as French kings, it is taken, and it is usually very cruelly done. It’s deeply out of place & kind of baffling.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Death of parent, Suicide, and Suicide attempt
Moderate: Fatphobia, Adult/minor relationship, Infidelity, and Mental illness
Minor: Pregnancy, Abandonment, Biphobia, Misogyny, and Body shaming
some assorted things I remember jumping out at me: repeated fatphobic comments, a couple odd instances of biphobia, usage of “schizophrenic” to describe someone being hypocritical
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