LETTING GO

What women writers give up in order to come into their own.

- LAUREN MICHELE JACKSON

When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married but not sure she wanted to be, suddenly distrustful of the neat, conventional course—marriage, kids, burbs—plotted out since she met her husband, at nineteen. It was as though the disease’s rending of a maternal bond had severed her contract with the prescribed feminine itinerary. Soon enough, she and her husband were seeing other people; then he moved out, and she began making pilgrimages to visit Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.

The unassuming resting place of the long-deceased author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” tucked behind the bustle of King’s Cross station, had a sort of aura. The daughter whom Wollstonecraft, stricken in childbirth, never got to know—the daughter who became famous as the creator of “Frankenstein”—learned her letters by tracing their shared name on her mother’s headstone, and later pronounced the budding love between her and a then married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, at the site. “When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility,” Biggs writes. On one occasion, she brought a lover, without explaining her reason for the visit. She sensed that Wollstonecraft, who knew something of death, sex, possibility, would have understood.