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    The Nightmare: A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft
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    The Nightmare: A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft
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    The Nightmare: A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft
    Ebook346 pages5 hours

    The Nightmare: A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft

    By Nancy Means Wright

    2/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft meets Henry Fuseli at her publisher’s circle of intellectuals, philosophers, and artists, and becomes obsessed with him and his erotic painting The Nightmare. When it is stolen, Fuseli accuses young painter Roger Peale, who is clapped into Newgate Prison. Escaping with the aid of a French émigré from the Revolution, Peale is ambushed by a highwayman and taken to a madhouse. Meanwhile Fuseli’s footman, a witness to the theft, is killed in a carriage “accident.†And bluestocking Isobel Frothingham is strangled after a soiree and posed to resemble Fuseli’s perverse masterpiece. Wollstonecraft’s impetuous nature leads her to propose a ménage à trois with Fuseli and his wife, and when rebuffed-always on the side of the underdog-to investigate the case to clear the young artist and rescue Isobel’s illegitimate daughter.
    Wright’s first mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft, Midnight Fires, was called “captivating†by Publishers Weekly. And mystery author Patricia Wynn says, “The Nightmare does what good historical fiction should do-makes me wonder where the truth ends and fiction begins.â€
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPerseverance Press
    Release dateMar 4, 2015
    ISBN9781564747525
    Unavailable
    The Nightmare: A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft

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    Reviews for The Nightmare

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    • 4/5
      In 1781, Mary Wollstonecraft has just published her Vindications of the Rights of Women and is active with the men and women of intellectual London. This crowd includes erotic painter Henry Fuseli, with whom Mary is obsessed. When Fuseli's masterpiece, The Nightmare, is stolen, Fuseli blames minor artist Roger Peale and has him arrested. Mary doubts Peale's guilt, and Peale's fiancee turns to Mary for help, but Mary's obsession with Fuseli hampers her ability to think straight. When fellow intellectual and bluestocking Isobel Frothingham is murdered, her dead body arranged in The Nightmare's tableau, and found by Mary's maid, Mary wonders if there is a connection between the theft and the murder.Wright captures the character of intellectual London brilliantly. These writers, artists and French revolutionaries are passionate idealists, but they lack common sense. With their heads in the clouds trying to unravel the grand philosophical knots plaguing mankind, they stumble into the mud puddles at their feet. Obsessed with trying to change her sexual attraction to Fuseli into an intellectual ideal, Mary hardly pays any mind to the crimes of the story, making her a bizarre yet intriguing sleuth. When she helps to solve the mystery, it is almost as an after-thought: save France from its corrupt royalty, demand equal rights for women, discover murderer and avoid being killed . . . . Devotes to the murder mystery genre might be frustrated by the lack of focus characters show to solving the crimes, yet I found Mary's scatter-brained intellectualism charming. I appreciate Wright's ability to model her fictional Mary Wollstonecraft with the clay of the historical person, keeping her personality and foibles and not pretending that when faced with a murder she would suddenly become Sherlock Holmes.