Bee Rowlatt Meet the Author

Now it's time for Meet the Author.

Bee Rowlatt is a writer and journalist,

and the mother of four children.

She has also been a fan since her student days of

Mary Wollstonecraft, pioneering feminist, and the mother of Mary

Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

In Search Of Mary:

The Mother Of All Journeys, is a sort of travel book, in

which Bee, accompanied by her baby son Will, travels to Scandinavia

and Paris in Wollstonecraft's footsteps, and later to California.

It is also an exploration of what it means to be a feminist,

Wollstonecraft's world, and the modern world.

Bee Rowlatt, let's start with Mary Wollstonecraft.

A lot of people, probably even today, will not know who she is.

The very brief introduction?

The brief introduction is that she is the foremother of feminism.

She wrote the earliest account of women's equality,

which was a vindication of the rights of woman, in 1792.

What is less known about her is that she did travel writing,

war reporting, she was a fearless and intrepid explorer of the world.

And a great Enlightenment philosopher.

And she also had a famous daughter?

She had a very famous daughter who wrote Frankenstein, Mary Shelley.

And why have you always been so fascinated with her?

This goes back a long way, doesn't it?

It does, we have got a lot of history together.

It actually came about when I was an undergrad student

looking at the Romantic poets.

It turned out that they were very heavily influenced by this

travel writing that she did.

She wrote a book called Letters From Norway, a fairly

obscure, now fairly obscure, book.

It details a journey that she undertakes

around the shores of Scandinavia.

She does not reveal her true purpose.

But the writing itself is this extraordinary combination of kind

of very dry local detail, and then these sort of ecstatic,

sublime yearnings.

They are in the shape of letters, all addressed to some mystery

person.

And then fairly recently, in the 1970s, scholars and historians

discovered that the actual true purpose of her writings was that she

had been sent off on a treasure hunt by her dodgy boyfriend,

to whom the letters are addressed.

There is a whole load of backstory.

She met him in Paris during the revolution when she had gone

over there, and he had been selling revolutionary, selling aristocrats'

silver in Scandinavia in exchange for food, possibly arms.

One of these shipments of silver had gone missing, and he packed her off,

with her young daughter, her baby daughter, in search of this silver.

That was astonishing, because she was a single mum travelling

in very difficult conditions.

These were times, you know, 1795, these were times when most men

would not travel on their own.

You know, there really were highwaymen and pirates.

And she goes off with a baby!

And to me, that just seems so incredible,

you know, the very vexed subject of careers versus motherhood,

it seems to be one of those topics that doesn't ever go away.

I just thought, how on earth did she do it?

So, you set out to find out by doing it yourself,

with your young son, Will?

Yes, I hoped to do a Wollstonecraft!

Well, this is a very entertaining book.

Will comes across as quite a powerful character.

How old was he when you went?

Well, as luck would have it, when we travelled, he was

the same age as Wollstonecraft's baby, roughly ten months old.

Just starting to crawl, you know, not the easiest phase

as a travelling companion.

He is very cute, there are lots of photographs

of the two of you in Norway.

And it looks beautiful.

You are by the sea.

It is wonderful.

But it is quite tough, isn't it, travelling by yourself with a baby?

It is not easy.

But part of the revelation was that actually it gives you a brilliant

entree into people's lives.

Because people do take you on, you know.

We were put up in strangers' houses, everybody talked to us, you know,

who is this weird Wollstonecraft fanatic,

travelling around with a baby?

You know, we were quite an oddity, in much the same way that

Wollstonecraft was.

She actually describes this in her writing.

What did you learn about Wollstonecraft that you hadn't

known before?

How brave she was.

It was just astonishing what she did.

I knew for example that she suffered quite accute depression,

and this is very apparent in the reading of the book.

She tried to take her own life.

She did.

She attempted suicide twice, and, you know, these things I really

struggled with, because basically I am a really happy person.

So, whilst I wanted to get as close as I could,

there were moments when I just...

There were things that I found very hard to approach, for instance,

her death.

It took me a long time to be able to write about that.

In the book, you also take a trip with Will, a little bit

later, to Paris, to try and retrace her steps during the revolution.

There is a wonderful photograph of Will attempting to break away up

the stairs in Paris.

And then you also went to California later and met some really...

Slightly weird and wacky feminists in California.

What were you trying to do?

Wollstonecraft of course never went to California.

Wollstonecraft wanted to go to America.

For her, that was the true frontier.

She fell in love with an American frontierman.

As the French Revolution became increasingly bloody and violent,

her gaze went from the blood-soaked streets of Paris to America.

That is true of so many of the Romantics.

So she wanted to go, sadly she didn't live long enough.

She had plans to take her family out there.

It seemed that in her eyes that was the revolution that worked.

For me, I wanted to go to see where her feminist legacy, you know,

how far you can push it, where is the logical conclusion,

where does it go?

The question which you pose at one point in the book is whether

feminism and working motherhood are just middle-class occupations.

You are essentially middle-class, you are a writer, your husband works

for the BBC, Justin Rowlatt, the BBC's correspondent in Delhi now.

What is your answer, from your own experience, your own

travels, and from Wollstonecraft, what is your answer to question?

My answer is that, you know, feminism should be

a very big umbrella, there is space for everybody.

It is not, whilst I completely content that, yes, some women do not

have the option of choosing, they just have to strap a baby to their

back and still go out and plough the fields, they don't have the luxury

of that debate, you know, everybody's experience is valid,

and everybody's experience is worthy of telling.

At one point in this book you take a detour to Holbeck Leeds to meet

a friend of yours who works there with very disadvantaged women.

Tell me about Holbeck and its significance?

It is a friend of mine who works in community social outreach

in Holbeck, which is possibly one of the most

underprivileged parts of Leeds.

It was shocking.

She works with people who are completely excluded and have

children under the age of five.

And it just blew me away, actually.

It is...

You know, I'm from Yorkshire, this is in our country,

and it was poverty that I hadn't really seen before.

It made the reading of Wollstonecraft even more

poignant, because that is what she was all about.

She was about the vulnerable position of women, and single

mothers, in today's society, which increasingly seems, with austerity,

it seems an increasingly cruel place for a struggling single mum.

And she spoke very much about that.

Should we know more about Wollstonecraft?

Absolutely, we should know more about Wollstonecraft.

I can't believe she isn't more famous.

That was partly the motivation behind writing the book, was that I

just couldn't believe that there is this incredible woman who did

so much and achieved so much in so little time, she died when she was

38, she died at the peak of her writing powers. It is heartbreaking.

So, she isn't well enough known, and I will not be satisfied

until she is famous everywhere!

Bee Rowlatt, thank you very much indeed.

Thank you.

Good