I was unfamiliar with Mary Wollstonecraft before reading this historical novel. Mastro's portrayal of the world's first feminist invoked awe and inspiration for me. Her stellar choices and gutsy lifestyle, with no mentor to guide her, astounded me. The prose set me back in the late 1700s where I could easily imagine the choices I would make if given the same opportunities and circumstances. I'll be reading this one again and again. I can only imagine being part of a bookclub discussion with this novel.

Solitary Walker is an historical novel about the life of the eighteenth century women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft. Whilst many might recognise the name - and perhaps have heard of her most famous work 'A Vindication of the Rights of Women' - her life story may be less well known. This book puts this to rights.
Mary was unorthodox in how she lived her life and in what she stood for and wrote about, despite the strong moral codes of her times. Despite this, we find that she continues to support her drunkard and abusive father and her haphazard and often whining siblings, feeling the duty of obligation - even when she has very little herself - too strong to ignore. The book suggests that she may have been driven by her beliefs into actions that were against her own best interests and that she may have denied herself some happinesses because of her adherence to the views she wrote so passionately about. We learn more about the lot of women writers at the time - often not being published under their own names, for fear of recrimination or ridicule. We see Mary's work being taken seriously when she is assumed to be a man and shouted down when it is found that she is a woman. It's interesting that this author writes as N.J. Mastro - though makes no secret of the fact that she is a female author. I don't know if this is a coincidence but it seems fitting and might just give us pause for thought.
There is a large section in the novel about Mary's time in France during the Revolution: absolutely fascinating on so many levels. Liberating and terrifying for Mary in equal measure, this is a wonderful examination of personal flowering within a context of real historical detail. Mary's reaction to seeing King Louis XVI being taken to court provokes thoughts about equality for all, not just the rights of women.
Occasionally I found the book sounding more like a biography than an historical novel - a difficult balance perhaps for an author who has been so immersed in their research - but I liked the vehicle of the novel and felt the author rarely strayed into flights of fancy about Mary. Which seems right and proper for a woman so rarely prone to such things herself.

The full title of this newly published book is SOLITARY WALKER: A NOVEL OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, a woman who has fascinated me for years. An English writer and philosopher considered by many to be the mother of the feminist movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) led a life full of tragedy, adventure, travel, persecution and love. All the elements you need for great historical fiction. And precisely why I awarded the book five stars.

For those who are unfamiliar with the story of her life, I will only speak generically to avoid spoiling the pleasure of reading this chronological account of Wollstonecraft's life. She endured what we would call now a trauma-filled childhood where, as the eldest girl, she felt a keen responsibility for the care of her siblings. Her formidable mind, developed primarily through self-education, made Wollstonecraft one of the most progressive thinkers of her era. She experienced both highs and lows in her relationships with men. She bucked the conventions of her society, traveled more than was typical (especially for a woman), witnessed firsthand the Reign of Terror in Paris, and was one of the only woman of her era to earn a living by writing. Her published works attest to how far ahead of society she was in her attitudes about gender, marriage, politics, and government.

I have read other books about both Wollstonecraft and her famous daughter, Mary Godwin Shelley (1797-1851) -- author of FRANKENSTEIN and wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) -- but what this author has excelled at is creating a deep, rich, and believable inner life for this 18th century intellectual.

Wollstonecraft's thoughts, motivations, fears, and emotions are all tied to her history and experiences, just as ours are. We understand why she acts as she does. In fact Mastro's portrayal is so skillful that Wollstonecraft feels as fully human and three-dimensional as anyone you might know today. She is a true heroine of her own story. Don't miss this one; it represents the best of the historical fiction genre.

Solitary Walker, a meticulously researched and beautifully written historical biography, brings to life the brilliant, complicated Wollstonecraft, placing her amidst the turmoil and change unfolding in England, France, and the rest of Europe. Through Mastro, we see Wollstonecraft struggling to make sense of these changes and live a life of principle and meaning. Readers will also recognize echoes of today's challenges—persistent gender roles, double standards, and the ongoing fight for equality—making Wollstonecraft’s story as relevant now as it was in her time.

Solitary Walker is that rare gem of historical bio-fiction that quickly becomes a page-turner. In profiling the 18th-century woman hailed as the world’s first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, author N.J. Mastro has brought to life a “young woman of uncommon humanity . . . who loves with passion, but finds herself trapped in society’s expectations.” She will go on to upend those restrictions as an author, adventurer, and advisor. Wollstonecraft endures an unloving and violent childhood in England, witnesses the French revolution first-hand, writes boldly on the rights of women, falls deeply in (misguided) love, struggles with depression throughout her life, and travels daringly to far-off lands—all this becoming more material for her revolutionary writings. She’s that rare woman of her times who rejects the era’s strictures of marriage to remake her most lasting relationship into one she deems acceptable. Solitary Walker is rich with research and adept at reimagining Wollstonecraft’s conversations from the record and her own writings, as its historic sweep unfolds, captivating the reader—who’ll marvel at the daring of the little-known mother of feminism.

So emotionally invested had I become by book’s end in N.J. Mastro’s involving novel about Mary Wollstonecraft, “Solitary Walker,” that I was truly saddened to learn in an afterword that Mary’s firstborn, Fanny, died by her own hand with laudanum – the very means by which, in a sad correspondence, Mary attempted suicide herself.
Such was the depth of desperation felt by mother and daughter alike in a life which began for Mary in an impoverished household where her alcoholic father so regularly abused his wife that Mary vowed she would never marry. And while she did in fact later marry, she remained a true early feminist throughout her life, even getting herself fired from a governess position for preaching a message of female self-sufficiency to her charges. (“Your methods are too liberal,” she is upbraided by the children's mother, whose ears are closed to Mary’s plea that “surely we can find common ground.”)
Upsetting as being fired was, though, to both her and the children, who had come to adore her – “I will become a wild animal without her!” one of the daughters protests to her mother – it’s not the end of the world for her, with how she had viewed the employment as a sideways existence or “purgatory” from her true goal of making her own way in the world as a solitary woman and in particular becoming a published writer, something she’d in fact achieved to some extent by the time of the governess position with publication of “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.”
And it is in fact to the kindly publisher of that work to whom she turns after the firing, and with whom she enjoys a congenial enough relationship that he puts her up and encourages her interest in traveling to Paris to write about the French Revolution, which is much in the air with its cries of liberty and equality and its echoes of the American Revolution.
Once on French soil, though, she finds the situation as much frightening as exhilarating, with the new governing powers seeming to her to be demonstrating the makings of an authoritarian regime as they daily put their critics to the guillotine, including, in a particularly distressing moment for May, a woman she was familiar with being stripped naked before being executed.
It’s also in France that Mary encounters the man who will become her lover and with whom she will bear Fanny, though, in a lifelong disappointment for her, he will never actually marry her even though he consents to her using his last name. So much of a trial, indeed, will he prove to be for her that, coupled with her circumstances in general, it will drive her not just to the laudanum suicide attempt but also another attempt in which she throws herself into the Thames.
Later, though, there will be another, better man whom she will indeed marry and with whom she will have a second daughter who will go on to publish the famous novel “Frankenstein.”
A depressingly sad story, in short, Mary’s, and as I say, engagingly enough told that I felt a strong empathy with both her and Fanny, even if, as with all historical fiction for me, I kept wondering just how much dramatic license was being taken with historical accuracy – a not unwarranted concern, as it turned out, with how I also learned in the afterword that a particularly sympathetic and engaging character in the novel was in fact a fabrication or composite.
Still, Mastro’s novel, with however much occasional license it might take, is an engrossing account of an actual historical figure during a revolutionary time which to my mind bears not a little correspondence with our own, what with both times seeing to my mind an at least temporary departure from an original lofty dream of independence. We’re obviously not at a point in our own time where dissidents are being carted off in carts to their deaths, but fear of retribution certainly seems enough in the air to be governing political action – how else to explain Senate confirmation of manifestly unqualified candidates? – and death threats to dissident voices have become common and actual execution has in fact been suggested for a military figure simply for speaking truth to power.

N.J. Mastro, Solitary Walker A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft, Black Rose Writing, February 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley and Black Rose Writing, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.
Solitary Walker A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft is an ideal start to learning more about this complex feminist, the writer of important documents; accommodating and helpful sister; a friend of women of worth, and also a critic of many; mother of Mary Shelley; and friend, lover and wife of men of merit – and, unfortunately, some who do not deserve this accolade. As with any worthy writer of historical fiction, Mastro concludes her work with an explanation of where fiction and fact mix; where the former overtakes the reality, or fictional characters comprise several real people; and reference to the biographical works and Wollstonecraft’s texts that she uses.

This novel admirably blends the woman who wrote so convincingly about the rights, first of men, and in a later treatise, of women, fiction and adjurations about the way in which women should be educated and measured, with the flawed person who gave far more attention to the opinions of some men, together with her imprudent emotional attachments. Mastro convincingly argues that much of the emotional dilemmas to which Wollstonecraft was prey arise from her childhood. This is not dwelt upon, but is made apparent through clever, but brief, references to the past and Wollstonecraft’s continuing sense of responsibility to sometimes unappreciative siblings.

I found this an interesting and easy read. However, I found the writing style rather constrained. While I appreciated this book as a good purveyor of information that might otherwise be found only in weighty academic accounts the writing lacked the engrossingly engaging style suited to historical fiction. On the other hand, this does not detract from the Solitary Walker A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft as a worthy contribution to knowledge about the ‘first feminist.’