Around the time I realised I didn’t want to be married any more, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave,” begins this unusual blend of memoir, criticism and literary biography by the journalist Joanna Biggs. Finding herself newly single, and her mother fading from Alzheimer’s, Biggs might have turned to friends, or drink, or late-night posts on social media.
Instead, she looked for comfort in the lives and works of Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante. She yearned for freedom, but didn’t know what it should look like. “Who do you tell,” she writes, “when you start to feel these things?” As she learns from her literary heroines, Wollstonecraft’s grave is not the worst place to turn when life is in a spin.
