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mention her and replying in her voice. Generally they are students having to write an essay, and often they can’t spell her name. But nonetheless up pops Roberta in full eighteenth-century mode, asking how she can help. Sometimes she is sought out directly. I ask how she knows what to say.
    “I try to project, based on the texts. For example I was approached on Twitter about the SlutWalk. In reply I gave them soundbites of Wollstonecraft’s opinions on modesty.” She pauses. “I never heard back.”
    Wollstonecraft’s not all about disapproval, though. She’s often mischievous, and she enjoys the beauty of people she meets on her travels. Especially noteworthy is her observation that women in their thirties are hotter – the “perfect state” of “majestic seriousness” – than their twenty-something counterparts. By my calculations, if we allow for inflation, then these days that sexy majestic seriousness lasts well beyond our forties. Result.
    Roberta lives alone and far from her family. After losing her job, she started her Wollstonecraft blog on the anniversary of Wollstonecraft’s death. “I’m not obsessed…” she says lightly, and not for the last time. I don’t mind if she is or not. I’ve been Wollstonecrafting in solitude for so long that I get carried away, overexcited with the companionship of the moment.
    “Do you actually want to make her be alive – to bring her back?”
    Roberta hesitates, but doesn’t pick up on my half-baked hopes of a séance. “I think the world would be better if there were more people in it like her, willing to stand up and speak out, willing to take a risk.”
    I feel foolish, as though I’d tried to invoke Wollstonecraft’s ghostly presence with us right here at the table with our flat white coffees and lemon cakes. Nonetheless I leave this encounter completely abuzz. She’s among us – she’s alive on socialmedia: Wollstonecraft is at large. I’ve found a comrade, indeed a fan club, after all the lonesome admiring.
    I hop on my bike, rushing back for my childcare deadline, and cycle past the back of St Pancras Old Church. After a dark railway tunnel, near an ugly house with white vans outside, is a row of steps and a heavy iron gate. On the other side of the gate – it’s right there. It’s necessary to stop here, and have a moment for Wollstonecraft’s gravestone. Like her, it may be old and modest, but it’s real, and it’s here. Her remains have since been reburied in Bournemouth, but I greet her anyway, waving merrily as though she can see me…

 
    Chapter Three:
    “I Feel Myself Unequal to the Task”
    I’m leaving on the trip next week. I’m starting to need a deep breath when I say it. The trip. Next week. Just remind myself again – what, exactly, am I letting myself in for? Flip open my well-thumbed copy of
Letters from Norway
.
    It’s June 1795. Europe is at war. Wollstonecraft sets off, with only her baby, Frances, and her maid, Marguerite, for company. They’re travelling from Hull to Sweden, and onwards to Norway, in an increasingly precarious combination of wobbly boats and strangers’ carriages. Along the way she writes the series of letters that will become her bestselling book. It’s a journey that most men would balk at: highwaymen and pirates are still very much at large. But not Wollstonecraft:
    I enter a boat with the same indifference as I change horses, and as for danger, come when it may, I dread it not sufficiently to have any anticipating fears.
    She’s putting on a brave face, though. Scared of boats, horses or pirates? No, she fears something far worse. Her deepest fear is losing her love, and her whole faith in love. Wollstonecraft has a shattered heart.
    Here’s the story behind
Letters from Norway
. That dodgy American boyfriend of hers? Gilbert Imlay. He’s a tall, handsome frontiersman who claims he was a captain in the American War of Independence. Gilbert. A proper cad’s name. They get together in