The ship loaded with silver that was chasing a great pioneer of feminism

Wollstonecraft. The beginning is always today, by Ricard Ruiz Garzón (Barcelona, 1973), is an adventure novel, a fictionalized biography of an exceptional woman of her time, and a recreation of Scandinavian legends of a fantastic nature. In the midst of the French Revolution, specifically in 1795, the writer, philosopher, and pioneer of feminism Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) traveled to Scandinavian lands to find a smuggling ship loaded with silver owned by her daughter's father, the merchant and diplomat Gilbert Imlay.

This real journey two years before her death (the poor woman dies ten days after giving birth to her daughter) allows Ricard Ruiz Garzón to construct a story that is, on the one hand, faithful to the map and the calendar and, on the other, a tale with cursed pendants and demonic monsters. In parallel, he sets in motion a mystical or supernatural device based on the appearance of famous people such as Mary W. Shelley (author of Frankenstein or Young Prometheus and daughter of the protagonist), the abbot Faria d'The Count of Monte Cristo', the painter Henry Fuseli (Mary W.'s lover) and, above all, a being from Scandinavian mythology who seems to be the origin of all nightmares: Mother (in English, nightmare isnightmare, night-mother, because Mother is the mistress of the night).

Wollstonecraft, an awkward figure

It is necessary to underline the enormous research work that Ricard Ruiz demonstrates in Wollstonecraft, a very well-researched novel about the character, the period and the settings it deals with, with real letters written by the story's protagonist. Mary Wollstonecraft is the author of the essay Vindication of Women's Rights (1792), a work that defends the ideals of the Enlightenment against the conservatism that promotes gender inequality. Wollstonecraft points out that women do not receive the same education as men and that because of this they do not have the same rights and seem inferior. In short: an "uncomfortable" figure that history has tried to silence, like so many others. Ruiz Garzón brings her out of oblivion and makes her the protagonist of a novel of sorority starring two brave and intelligent women who fight together. Margueritte Fournée—Margie, the narrator, the real protagonist of the bildungsroman—is a girl who grew up in an orphanage and, after living for a few weeks hidden in an attic during the hardest moments of the French Revolution, becomes the nanny of Fanny, Mary Wollstonecraft's one-year-old daughter. 17 years old, she is fascinated by the writer who will take her on a journey first through England and then through Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Despite the tenderness and innocence of the narrator-witness, it would have been nice if, at times, we had heard the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft herself to have a more intimate and, consequently, more psychological point of view.

Masterfully blending reality and the supernatural, Wollstonecraft It's a young adult novel in its most didactic sense. Some characters are stereotyped to the point of excess (the nanny herself, so clumsy she is, borders on caricature and, consequently, implausible), and others lack connection with the contemporary reader. Despite these details, the novel is a good portrait of the protagonists' demons and the suffocating machismo of society in the late 18th century. At the same time, Ricard Ruiz Garzón's novel leaves many questions up in the air for each reader to answer, given the open ending: Are we witnessing a woman's attempt to forgive herself? Is this a feminist manifesto? Is there a desire to reinvent the self? Or perhaps what she's pursuing is the desire to be free?