Mary Wollstonecraft Series

The Nightmare

Dismissed from her governess post in Ireland, Mary Wollstonecraft lands on her feet in London. After the 1792 publication of her controversial Vindication of the Rights of Woman (they called her a hyena in petticoats), she gains entrée to a circle of celebrated poets and writers (Wordsworth, Blake, Paine, et al.). But Mary becomes infatuated with artist Henry Fuseli, whose hauntingly erotic masterpiece, “The Nightmare,” has been stolen, and more scandal results when she offers a ménage à trois with him and his wife. Yet when an innocent young artist is sent to notorious Newgate Prison for the theft, Mary's passionate nature does not allow her to stand aside. Her quest for the truth will lead her to a chase in and out of a madhouse, the pursuit of a young girl's abductor, and confrontations with a gaggle of rogues.

Reviews & Comments:

A deft portrait of a vanished world and one of  history's most compelling women—not to be missed.
                —Stephanie Barron, author of the critically-acclaimed Jane Austen Mystery Series

Overlapping mysteries thicken the plot in this fast-paced story set in a circle of famous authors and artists, whose revolutionary fervor, passions, and injured innocence lead them into dangerous waters. Wright illuminates the complicated character of Mary Wollstonecraft—scandalous feminist and self—deluded romantic—with rebellious opinions, manic moodiness, and untamable energy.
                —Patricia Wynn, author of the award-winning Blue Satan Mystery Series

Wright skillfully evokes the people and ideas from the age of Enlightenment in her entertaining second mystery featuring Mary Wollstonecraft (after 2010's Midnight Fires), which once again shows how Mary's brilliance as a freethinker could have made her an expert crime-solver. In 1792, Mary is completing the second part of her renowned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman when her friend, painter Henry Fuseli, finds his famous painting The Nightmare stolen. Henry suspects a critic of his work and has the young man imprisoned. But when an acquaintance is murdered and her corpse left in a tableau suggestive of the artwork, Mary finds herself investigating an intrigue steeped in politics of the day characteristic of a conservative England and a revolutionary France. Several illegitimate children of uncertain paternity provide red herrings, and walk-ons by Fuseli, poet William Blake, and chemist Joseph Priestley help ground events in credible historical reality.
                —Publishers Weekly

Wright captures the character of intellectual London brilliantly…  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…  Yet I found her scatterbrained 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.
                —Elizabeth Caulfield Felt for Historical Novels Review

Read Chapter One of The Nightmare.

Here's a link to an article by Nancy published in the Burlington Free Press on Sunday, June 3, 2012

The Nightmare was published by Perseverance Press, September, 2011. ISBN 978-1-56474-509-5. $15.95.

Midnight Fires

18th century Mitchelstown Castle hums with intrigue. An impoverished but rebellious English governess (future author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) seeks justice after a young Irish rebel and a roguish aristocrat die in cold blood.

From the preface:

    Mary Wollstonecraft shocked the eighteenth century world with her outspoken views on marriage, children, and women's rights, her advocacy of divorce reform, and her involvement with the French Revolution.   She set off a tempest of scandal through her passionate love affairs, the birth of an illegitimate child, and her attempts at suicide.   A "hyena in petticoats," a contemporary called her.   Her short life was a continual struggle between her principles and her own sexuality.   The struggle ended at the age of thirty-eight when she died giving birth to a second but, this time, legitimate daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.   The latter married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and true to the Wollstonecraft blood, wrote the suspense novel, Frankenstein.
    Wollstonecraft (pronounced WALLston-croft) left numerous works to the world, including her famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman…   (Click here to read more from the preface of Midnight Fires)

Reviews & Comments:

At the start of this captivating historical set in 1786, Mary Wollstonecraft is on her way to Ireland to become a governess, "that most humiliating of occupations." At Mitchelstown Castle in County Cork, headstrong Mary, the future mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and future women's rights advocate, is determined to pen a novel and remain above the fray of castle politics while schooling Lord and Lady Kingsboroughs' daughters. Three suspicious deaths, however, compel Mary to seek justice for a poor young sailor, the family's troubled former governess, and even an aristocrat. It appears everyone from poet George Ogle, Lady K's new flirt, to a land tenant or two has a motive in one or more of these tangled deaths. As Mary snoops around in search of the culprit, she is bound not to lose herself to the mystery, her job, or the charms of any man. Wright (Mad Season and four other Ruth Willmarth mysteries) deftly illuminates 18th-century class tensions.
                —Publishers Weekly, February 15, 2010

RICH WITH HISTORY, PERSONALITY…  It's reasonable, if regrettable, to believe that few 21st-century American women have ever heard of Mary Wollstonecraft, but had there been media in 18th-century Britain and Ireland comparable to today's Internet, surely this early crusader for women's rights would have been an international celebrity. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, did become famous for marrying the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and for writing "Frankenstein."

Nancy Means Wright, a prolific, disciplined and well-informed Vermont author living in the town of Cornwall, has seized upon the true story of Wollstonecraft to create the heroine of a finely honed mystery set in Ireland at a time, roughly corresponding with the American Revolution, when the Irish suffered under the often-cruel thumb of insensitive, tradition-bound British aristocrats. It wasn't entirely Irish Catholics suppressed by British Protestants, but it was largely that way.

Since the real Mary Wollstonecraft — once described as "a hyena in petticoats," Wright tells us — was an extremely controversial figure in the early and predictably futile struggles to liberate women from the stultifying yoke of traditional male domination, Wright had a rich field of history to harvest in gathering material for her novel.
                —Click here to continue reading this review by A.C. Hutchison Vermont Sunday Magazine, April 4, 2010

A delightful new arrival on the historical mystery scene, Midnight Fires… is an entertainingly seamy portrayal of provincial aristocrats and the day-to-day messiness of 18th century life. Add a feisty, engaging heroine in the young Mary Wollstonecraft and the result is an atmospheric & absorbing whodunit.
                —Susanne Alleyn, author of The Aristide Ravel Mysteries

Despite the constraints of class, culture, stays and skirts, Wright's fictionalized Mary Wollstonecraft is thoroughly engaging on her voyage of detection and self-discovery.
                —Kate Flora, Edgar- nominated author of Finding Amy

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