- With Lizzy's at your back, head straight forward across the Green and stop on the patch of grass on the other side of the path.
This will be the site for the Mary Wollstonecraft memorial by contemporary artist Maggi Hambling.
Did you know?
You are now walking through the site of Wollstonecraft Live! by Kaethe Fine, conceived by Anna Birch and Kaethe Fine, and directed by Anna Birch performances in September 2005. These unique multimedia performances began in Unitarian Meeting House and continued on the Green and were reprised as some of the last performances in the Unitarian Meeting House in 2018 before it closed for renovation.
In the late summer of 2007 Fragments & Monuments hosted a picnic and outdoor screening where you are walking of the The Wollstonecraft Live Experience! films on the Green with live music performed by the famous Deidre Cartwright Trio.
In 2019 local company Scary Little Girls joined forces with Fragments & Monuments to celebrate Mary and the Living Literature Walks were held here funded, by the Heritage Lottery and supported by Stoke Newington Literary Festival. At this point in the walk the audience listened to Wollstonecraft’s words as interpreted by playwright by Kaethe Fine in the specially composed soundscape by composer Alastair Gavin and were given postcards encouraging them to give generously to the Mary On the Green memorial fund.
Listen - a walking memorial
(excerpted from Wollstonecraft Live! by Kaethe Fine)
Music by Alastair Gavin
Wollstonecraft Live live live
(Music)
...why should not one woman acknowledge that she can take more exercise than another ? or in other words that she has a sound constitution? And why, to damp innocent vivacity, is she darkly to be told that men will draw conclusions which she thinks little of?
Let the Libertine draw what inference he pleases but I hope (whispers) Wollstonecraft Live... that no sensible mother with restrain the natural frankness of youth by instilling such indecent cautions.
...Women ought to endeavor to purify their heart, but can they do so when their uncultivated understandings make them entirely dependent on their senses for employment and amusement? When no noble pursuits set them above the petty vanities of the day, or enables them to curb the wild emotions that agitate a reed over which ever passing breeze has power.
To gain affections of a virtuous man is affectation necessary? (rewind) ...To gain affections of a virtuous man...(rewind) affection of a virtuous man...(rewind) of a virtuous man (rewind. cut)
To gain affections is affectation necessary? (whispers) Wollstonecraft Live...
Weakness may excite tenderness and gratify the arrogant pride of man (rewind) arrogant pride of man (rewind) of man. (cut)
Weakness may excite tenderness and gratify arrogant pride but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for and deserves to be respected.
Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship! (rewind)
A noble mind that pants for and deserves to be respected. Fondness is. (Static. Rewind)
But the lordly caresses of a.
Of a protector will not gratify a noble mind.
...that pants for a deserves to respected.
Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.
Hear! Hear!
It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow should be only organized dust, ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps or spark goes out. (whispers) Wollstonecraft Live... Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable.
And life is more than a dream...
