KWR: When I started writing
Vindicated, I wrote about the moment of Mary Shelley’s birth and the strange circumstances of her birth: the fact that her mother was this famous and somewhat infamous woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died of septicemia (blood poisoning) and of a retained placenta 11 days after Mary was born. Oddly, the physicians who were attending the birth brought in puppies to nurse Mary Wollstonecraft instead of bringing her child in, and that was the strangest thing. I had been a nurse in labor and delivery, and it sounded really odd. But after I wrote that prologue, I read a biography of Mary Shelley and found out that she was so much more than the author of