In Newington Green, a statue has been erected in honour of Mary Wollstonecraft who with friends set up a nearby school in 1784 “teaching girls to think to have their own voice.” The statue is accompanied by an inscription that contains Mary’s words: “I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.”
Three women dressed in identical black dresses perform the informative and at times moving biographical play Mary’s Daughters. The focus is Mary (Megan Carter), but we also learn about her daughter, better known as Mary Shelly, the writer of Frankenstein, and her older daughter, Frances ‘Fanny’ Imlay.
Mary is, from an early age, fairly radical and is shown at a dinner arguing continuously with the revolutionary Thomas Paine to such an extent that Horace Walpole calls her a “hyena in petticoats.” That radicalism led her to support, in writing, the 1789 French Revolution against the nonsense of Burke and to travel to Paris to engage more fully with the events.
She is mostly remembered for her book A Vindication on the Rights of Woman, which not only stirred up many an argument in her lifetime but became an inspiration to many Second Wave Feminists of the 1960s. Her own life included many difficulties that resulted in two failed suicide attempts. The cast recreates the final minutes of her attempt to drown by jumping into the Thames River from Putney Bridge.
Her daughter Fanny (Kaya Bucholc) was born in revolutionary France and was nearly orphaned when the ruling Jacobins began executing other rebels. Three years later, the birth of Mary (Shelly) involved a break in the placenta, which we hear was handled by a doctor with unwashed hands resulting in a lethal septicaemia that killed her eleven days later.
We only glimpse Mary Shelly (Rachael Reshma), who leads a wild life. In an imagined scene, her mother tells her, “my life's scandal made your Bohemia possible.” Towards the end of the show, we hear a reading of an optimistic passage from Frankenstein.
Fanny seems to share many of her family's ideas but without the sensational public profile. There are also difficulties and complications that cause unhappiness she needs to resolve.
It is a thoughtful and lively performance with a cast that carries us confidently through the decades. However, the show’s heavy reliance on descriptive storytelling lacks dramatic tension which in turn limits the depth of characterisation and our engagement with what’s at stake in terms of political arguments around women’s rights.
At the time, those who ruled insisted on so few rights for women that Mary could make many comparisons between women’s position and that of slaves.
The play is a great opportunity to learn more about a few of the women who have inspired and helped to create a more gender fair (though not yet sufficiently fair) society.