Samantha Silva

Samantha Silva writes novels and screenplays that turn literary lives into imaginative historical fiction. Her stage, film, and prose work reflects an interest in the pressures surrounding authorship, memory, and artistic inheritance. Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft, published by Flatiron Books in 2021, centers the pioneering writer and philosopher during the final days following the birth of her daughter Mary. Silva frames the novel as Wollstonecraft recounting her life to the infant who would become Mary Shelley. The story moves through her work as a governess, her London writing career, her relationship with publisher Joseph Johnson, and her encounters with political thinkers and artists. That structure gives the historical figure control over the telling of her own experiences while connecting one writer’s legacy to another’s beginning. Silva had previously written Mr. Dickens and His Carol, and both novels approach celebrated literary figures through intimate fictional perspectives rather than conventional biography. Love and Fury reached finalist status for the Chautauqua Prize.