Vindication

Vindication is a prodigious, spectacular debut - a whirlwind of a novel that offers a passionate and surprising vision of life and love through the lens of the turbulent, romantic, often brutal eighteenth century. "Sherwood's heralded debut is an arresting and convincing portrayal of Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman and perhaps the first feminist. Lending her subject a modern sensibility, Sherwood describes Mary's wretched childhood, and follows her through the humiliation of demeaning jobs and chronic poverty." - Publishers Weekly

native of Washington, D. C., Frances Sherwood is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of an NEA grant. Her stories, which have twice won O.

Henry Awards, are collected in the volume Everything You've Heard Is True (1989). She lives in South Bend, Indiana, where she teaches at Indiana University, and is working on a new novel.