Mary Wollstonecraft

International Library of Essays in the History of Social and Political ThoughtSeries Editor: Tom Campbell

Titles in the Series:

Hannah Arendt Thomas PaineAmy Allen Bruce Kuklick

James Madison Max WeberTerence Ball Peter Lass man

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Mary WollstonecraftMontesquieu Jane MooreDavid Carrithers

T.H. GreenEmile Durkheim John MorrowRoger Cotterrell

Martin HeideggerVilfredo Pareto Stephen MulhallJoseph Femia

Jean-Jacques RousseauJean Bodin Timothy O ’HaganJulian H. Franklin

Michel FoucaultDavid Hume David OwenKnud Haakonssen and Richard Whatmore

John RawlsEdmund Burke David A. ReidyIain Hampsher-Monk

Immanuel KantTalcott Parsons Arthur RipsteinJohn Holmwood

Jeremy BenthamThomas Aquinas Frederick RosenJohn Inglis

Theodor AdornoJurgen Habermas, Volumes I and II James SchmidtChristian Joerges, Klaus Guenther and CamilUngureanu Thomas Hobbes

Gabriella SlompAristotleGeorge Klosko Friedrich Nietzsche

Tracy StrongG.W.F. HegelDudley Knowles

Mary Wollstonecraft

Edited by

Jane MooreCardiff University, UK

O RoutledgeTaylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

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Copyright © Jane Moore 2012. For copyright of individual articles please refer to the Acknowledgements.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataMary Wollstonecraft. - (International library of essays in

the history of social and political thought)1. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797 - Political and social views. 2. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797 - Criticism and interpretation.I. Series II. Moore, Jane, 1962- 828.6'09-dc22

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011935100

ISBN 9780754627432 (hbk)

Contents

A cknowl edgem entsSeries PrefaceIntroduction

PART I SURVEY OF THE WORK AND REPUTATION

1 George Eliot (1855), ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, The Leader, 290, pp. 988-9.

2 Emma Goldman (1911), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Struggle for Freedom’, reprinted in Feminist Studies, 7, (1981), pp. 114-21.

3 Virginia Woolf (1932), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, in The Common Reader: Second Series, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 156-63.

4 Regina M. Janes (1978), ‘On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman', Journal o f the History o f Ideas,39, pp. 293-302.

5 Gary Kelly (1976), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Texts and Contexts’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 2, pp. 38^10.

6 Sylvana Tomaselli (1992), ‘Remembering Mary Wollstonecraft on the Bicentenary of the Publication of A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman', British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15, pp. 125-30.

PART II CONTEXTS: HISTORY, POLITICS, CULTURE

Wollstonecraft and Social, Philosophical and Political Theory7 G.J. Barker-Benfield (1989), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century

Commonwealthwoman’, Journal o f the History o f Ideas, 50, pp. 95-115.8 Virginia Sapiro (1996), ‘Wollstonecraft, Feminism, and Democracy:

“Being Bastilled’” , in Maria J. Falco (ed.), Feminist Interpretations o f Mary Wollstonecraft, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 33^15.

9 Simon Swift (2006), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the “Reserve of Reason’” , Studies in Romanticism, 45, pp. 3-24.

Wollstonecraft, Gender and Enlightenment10 Janet Todd (1998), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Desire’,

Wordsworth Circle, 29, pp. 186-91.11 Sylvana Tomaselli (1985), ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History

Workshop Journal, 20, pp. 101-24.

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9

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25

35

39

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vi Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft Education and Conduct Literature12 Emma Rauschenbush-Clough (1898), ‘Her Demands for the Education of

Woman’, in A Study o f Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights o f Woman,London: Longmans, Green & Co., pp. 140-63.

13 Regina M. Janes (1976), ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Or, Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 5, pp. 121-39.

14 Vivien Jones (2005), ‘Advice and Enlightenment: Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 140-55.

Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution15 Tom Fumiss (1991), ‘Gender in Revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary

Wollstonecraft’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 65-100.

16 Jane Rendall (1997), “‘The Grand Causes which Combine to Carry Mankind Forward”: Wollstonecraft, History and Revolution’, Women’s Writing, 4, pp. 155-72.

Wollstonecraft and Religion17 Mary Wilson Carpenter (1986) ‘Sibylline Apocalyptics: Mary Wollstonecraft’s

Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman and Job’s Mother’s Womb’, Literature and History, 12, pp. 215-28.

18 Barbara Taylor (1997), ‘For the Love of God: Religion and the Erotic Imagination in Wollstonecraft’s Feminism’, in Eileen Janes Yeo (ed.),Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years o f Feminisms, London and New York: Rivers Oram Press, pp. 15-35, 244-6.

Wollstonecraft and Romanticism19 Mitzi Myers (1981), ‘Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of

Self and Subject’, Studies in Romanticism, 20, pp. 299-316.20 John Whale (1995), ‘Death in the Face of Nature: Self, Society and Body in

Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’, Romanticism, 1, pp. 177-92.

21 Harriet Devine Jump (1992), “‘No Equal Mind”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Young Romantics’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, 79, pp. 225-38.

Wollstonecraft, Femininity/Sexuality/Feminism22 Cora Kaplan (1983), ‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism’, in

Frederic Jameson et al. (eds), Formations o f Pleasure, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 15-35.

23 Barbara Taylor (1992), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism’, History Workshop Journal, 33, pp. 197-219.

24 Gary Kelly (1997), ‘(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and Female Sexuality’, Women’s Writing, 4, pp. 143-54.

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Mary Wollstonecraft vii

Wollstonecraft, Slavery and the Orient25 Moira Ferguson (1993), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery’,

in Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 8-33, 145-9.

PART III TEXTS: NOVELS, LITERARY REVIEWS, LETTERS

Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews26 Sally N. Stewart (1984), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to the

Analytical Review’, Essays in Literature, 11, pp. 187-99.Wollstonecraft’s Fictions - Mary. A Fiction and The Wrongs o f Woman;

or, Maria. A Fragment27 Mary Poovey (1982), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: The Gender of Genres in Late

Eighteenth-Century England’, Novel, 15, pp. 111-26.28 Tilottama Rajan (1988), ‘Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of

the Political Novel’, Studies in Romanticism, 27, pp. 221-51.Wollstonecraft’s Letters29 Mitzi Myers (1979), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written ... in Sweden:

Toward Romantic Autobiography’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture,8, pp. 165-85.

30 Janet Todd (2002), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters’, in Claudia L. Johnson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 7-23.

Wollstonecraft’s Death31 Vivien Jones (1997), ‘The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft’, British Journal for

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20, pp. 187-205.

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529

Name Index 549

http://taylorandfrancis.com

Acknowledgements

The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material.

Cambridge University Press for the essay: Janet Todd (2002), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters’, in Claudia L. Johnson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 7-23.

Charles Lamb Society for the essay: Harriet Devine Jump (1992), “‘No Equal Mind”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Young Romantics’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, 79, pp. 225-38.

Columbia University Press for the essay: Moira Ferguson (1993), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery’, in Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 8-33, 145-9. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Duke University Press for the essays: Gary Kelly (1976), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Texts and Contexts’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 2, pp. 38^10. Reprinted by permission of the current publisher, Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu; Mary Poovey (1982), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: The Gender of Genres in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, Novel, 15,pp. 111-26.

John Wiley and Sons for the essay: Sylvana Tomaselli (1992), ‘Remembering Mary Wollstonecraft on the Bicentenary of the Publication of A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman', British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15, pp. 125-30; Vivien Jones (1997), ‘The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20, pp. 187-205.

Johns Hopkins University Press for the essays: Regina M. Janes (1976), ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Or, Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared’, Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture, 5, pp. 121-39. Copyright © 1976 The American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press; Mitzi Myers (1979), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written ... in Sweden: Toward Romantic Autobiography’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 8, pp. 165-85. Copyright © 1979 The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Literature and History for the essay: Mary Wilson Carpenter (1986) ‘Sibylline Apocalyptics: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman and Job’s Mother’s Womb’, Literature and History, 12, pp. 215-28.

Oxford University Press for the essay: Sylvana Tomaselli (1985), ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History Workshop Journal, 20, pp. 101-24; Barbara Taylor (1992),

Mary Wollstonecraft

‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism’, History Workshop Journal, 33, pp. 197-219.

Palgrave Macmillan for the essay: Vivien Jones (2005), ‘Advice and Enlightenment: Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 140-55.

Taylor & Francis for the essays: Jane Rendall (1997),“‘The Grand Causes which Combine to Carry Mankind Forward”: Wollstonecraft, History and Revolution’, Women’s Writing, 4, pp. 155-72; Gary Kelly (1997), ‘(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and Female Sexuality’, Women’s Writing, 4, pp. 143-54.

Tom Fumiss for his essay: Tom Fumiss (1991), ‘Gender in Revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 65-100.

University of Edinburgh Press for the essay: John Whale (1995), ‘Death in the Face of Nature: Self, Society and Body in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark', Romanticism, 1, pp. 177-92. www.euppublishing.com.

University of Pennsylvania Press for the essays: Regina M. Janes (1978), ‘On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman', Journal o f the History o f Ideas, 39, pp. 293-302; G.J. Barker-Benfield (1989), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth- Century Commonwealthwoman’, Journal o f the History o f Ideas, 50, pp. 95-115. Copyright © 1989 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

Wordsworth Circle for the essay: Janet Todd (1998), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Desire’, Wordsworth Circle, 29, pp. 186-91.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Series Preface

The International Library of Essays in the History of Social and Political Thought brings together collections of important essays dealing with the work of major figures in the history of social and political thought. The aim is to make accessible the complete text with the original pagination of those essays that should be read by all scholars working in that field. In each case, the selection is made from the extensive available literature by an established expert who has a keen sense of the continuing relevance of the history of social and political thought for contemporary theory and practice. The selection is made on the basis of the quality and enduring significance of the essays in question. Every volume has an introduction that places the selection made in the context of the wider literature, the historical period, the contemporary state of scholarship and the editor’s particular interests.

TOM CAMPBELLSeries Editor

Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE)Charles Sturt University

Canberra

http://taylorandfrancis.com

Introduction

Prompted in large part by the women’s movement, there has been an explosion of interest in the philosopher, novelist and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) since the 1960s. Feminists, historians, social and political theorists, students of women’s writing and scholars of Romantic literature (not mutually exclusive groups, of course) have all paid sustained attention to the author’s work in recent decades. Though she languished in relative obscurity in the first half of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft’s critical stock in the first decades of the twenty-first is very high. This is, it might be pointed out, the second efflorescence of fame for Mary Wollstonecraft who, in her day, gained distinction - and notoriety - as a partisan of the French Revolution, a novelist, a travel writer, an educational theorist, and an advocate of what seemed to many at the time to be hare-brained notions of women’s intellectual and moral equality with men. But, however contentious her work was in the late Georgian age, Wollstonecraft is recognized now as a major author of the Romantic period. Her most famous work, Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman (1792), is acknowledged almost universally as the founding document of modem feminist political theory, while the second of her two experimental fictions, The Wrongs o f Woman; or, Maria. A Fragment (published posthumously in 1798) occupies a key place in the tradition of the English radical novel and the history of women’s writing.

With the renewal of interest in the so-called ‘Jacobin’ (pro-French Revolutionary) fiction of the 1790s, initiated by Gary Kelly in his important study The English Jacobin Novel 1780- 1805 (1976), and the willingness from the 1980s onwards to review the canon of English Romantic poetry as rather better populated than the historical preoccupation with the so-called ‘Big Six’ male poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats) would allow, Wollstonecraft has been read once more with great attention by literary critics. Her portrayal of the vicissitudes of suffering women and condemnation of what would today be called patriarchal oppression has prompted a number of feminist studies of her fictions. Similarly her political theory has also been much discussed. Perhaps this is not surprising; after all, Wollstonecraft’s Jacobin fiction has something of the soapbox polemic about it; written in the white heat of the French Revolution, it is both a means of artistic expression and a conduit to polemicize for her favourite causes: the need for a root-and-branch political reform in the United Kingdom and the necessity of emancipation, both in legal terms and by women themselves. Wollstonecraft’s visibility was also, of course, much improved by the fact that social and political theorists of modem feminism have seen her as the founder of what became retrospectively known in the 1970s as first-wave feminism, the period of activity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during which women fought for the right to vote and for a widening of their educational opportunities.

Wollstonecraft died in 1797 from an attack of puerperal fever (a form of septicaemia resulting from childbirth) eleven days after giving birth to her daughter (the future Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein). In death her reputation became even more contentious than it had been during her relatively short life, a notoriety prompted, it must be said, by

xiv Mary Wollstonecraft

the unwitting tarnishing of Wollstonecraft’s reputation by the publication in 1798 of her philosopher-husband William Godwin’s sexually-revelatory Memoirs. Motivated by an Enlightenment faith in transparency, Godwin (1756-1836) told the world of his wife’s love affair with the romantically feckless American businessman, author, and former captain in the American Revolutionary War, Gilbert Imlay (1754-1828), whose unfaithfulness and eventual abandonment of her and their (illegitimate) child Fanny Imlay for a strolling actress twice drove Wollstonecraft to attempt suicide.

Godwin’s Memoirs effectively demolished Wollstonecraft’s reputation in respectable circles for a century and more. The backlash was immediate and, in some cases, vitriolic. At the extreme end was the caustic reaction of the Tory Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, which indexed Godwin’s book under ‘Prostitution: see Mary Wollstonecraft’ (those enquiring for ‘MW’ were cross-referenced to ‘Prostitution’). Even erstwhile friends found the Memoirs difficult to stomach. The female novelist and member of Godwin’s circle, Amelia Alderson (later Opie (1769-1853)), had written before publication of the Memoirs that Wollstonecraft was one of the few things that had failed to disappoint her about contemporary England; following the Memoirs, however, she included a satirical portrait of Wollstonecraft and Godwin’s life together in her novel Adeline Mowbray (1804) that mocked their attempt to flout the conventions of marriage. (Godwin, indeed, had revealed that he and Wollstonecraft had consciously decided not to marry and only did so, several months into their relationship, because she fell pregnant by him.)

Even in the wake of the scandal caused by Godwin’s Memoirs, however, there is evidence to suggest that Rights o f Woman remained in print, if not throughout the nineteenth century, then for a good part of it. Each republication coincided with an upturn in the struggle both for women’s rights and the improvement of the lot of humankind. In the 1820s and ’30s, for example, the work found a special appeal among the British Owenite reformers and feminists (members of the philanthropic reforming group led by Robert Owen (1771-1858)), most particularly the sexual libertarian Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785-1848), co-author with the Irish early socialist economist William Thompson (1775-1833) of the Appeal o f One H alf o f the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions o f the Other, Men (1825)), and also among the politically radical Chartist movement of the 1840s. Both groups, however, were outside the political mainstream and both, indeed, further tainted the work by association, placing it beyond the reach - and beyond the pale - of ‘respectable’ female readers. Accordingly, when the British suffragist leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929) edited and introduced a new edition of Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman in 1890 she firmly distinguished the modem relevance of the book’s ideas from the sickening subject of its author’s ‘irregular relations’:

In unravelling the curious tangle of relationships, intrigues, suicides, and attempted suicides, of the remarkable group of personalities to whom Mary Wollstonecraft belonged, one is sickened forever, as Mr Matthew Arnold has said, of the subject of irregular relations. Mary Wollstonecraff s great merit, however, lies in this, that with a detachment of mind from the prejudices and errors of her time, in regard to the position of women, that was quite extraordinary, she did not sanction any deprecation of the immense importance of the domestic duties of women. She constantly exalted what was truly feminine as the aim of women’s education and training. (Fawcett, 1891, pp. 22-3)

Mary Wollstonecraft

Fawcett’s version of a sexually cleaned-up Wollstonecraft, so to speak, made Rights o f Woman acceptable reading for feminists and social reformers at the end of the nineteenth century. The legacy of that revised reputation, however, registered considerably differently with activists involved in the ‘second wave’ of the feminist or women’s liberation movement during the latter half of the following century. The sexual libertarianism of the 1970s women’s movement resulted in a somewhat vexed relationship with a text which, though acknowledged as a pioneering work, seemed to many to prohibit female sexual pleasure. For example, in her introduction to a 1975 edition of Rights o f Woman Miriam Kramnick highlighted the potentially ‘troubling’ aspect of Wollstonecraft’s statements on female sexuality:

The reader may find a few of the pronouncements the Vindication makes on marriage and motherhood frankly surprising. ‘The neglected wife, is in general, the best mother’ is one sober suggestion, and ‘an unhappy marriage is often advantageous to the family’ another. (Kramnick, 1986, p. 55)

If the perceived denial of women’s sexual pleasure seemed problematic to readers in the 1970s then subsequent generations of feminist critics have modified that reading by urging the need to situate the text firmly within its own historical and cultural moment. Hence Marilyn Butler’s argument in her introduction to the first scholarly seven-volume edition of The Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft (co-edited by Butler and Janet Todd)1 that the challenge of Rights o f Woman lies precisely in its critical engagement with contemporary culture:

Wollstonecraft’s special contribution is to apply to gender her contemporaries’ insights into cultural politics. Women as well as the masses become a class exploited in all cultures and all ages, and more specifically a class lied to by men throughout time. ‘Probably the prevailing opinion that woman was created for man may have taken its rise from Moses’s poetical story’, that Eve came from Adam’s rib. (5. 95) Through focusing on culture and on its most revered texts, including the Bible, Wollstonecraft exposes her readers’ prejudices, and moreover traces the process by which gender has been and still is being constructed. (Butler, 1989, p. 17)

The opening decades of the twenty-first century are in literary-critical terms an age of historicist and context-specific interpretation. In line with that model, this introduction will now set out the major themes and concerns of Wollstonecraft’s writing in relation to her personal life and the socio-political events of her age. The final section explains the organization of the volume and introduces the essays contained herein.

i t i t i t

In her life as in her work, Mary Wollstonecraft was a pioneer. Bom on 27 April 1759 into a relatively prosperous but eventually failing middle-class family, in Spitalfields, London, tyrannized by an incompetent father, a man who by her own account was no stranger to strong liquor and would sometimes act violently towards his submissive wife, she turned her back on the marriage market (the conventional way for a woman of her social class to escape the obliquities of a once well-to-do family rapidly descending into genteel poverty). Determined instead to make herself economically independent, in 1778 she took a post as a paid companion

1 Todd and Butler (1989); hereafter referenced as Works.

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to one Mrs Dawson in Bath - a city whose louche gaiety appalled Wollstonecraft - followed by sojourns in Windsor and Southampton. It was never her intention to stay for ever in Mrs Dawson’s employ, however, and in 1780 she returned to London to care for her own dying mother.

Rudderless in an employment market that had few rewarding opportunities for women Wollstonecraft decided in 1784 to open a school for girls in the community of rational dissenters at Newington Green, London, with the help of her close friend Fanny Blood and Wollstonecraft’s sisters, Everina and Eliza (she had recently helped the latter, who suffered from post-natal depression, to flee her husband). At Newington Green, Wollstonecraft lived among freethinking intellectuals, dissenters such as the Welsh-born firebrand and radically inclined minister, Dr Richard Price (1723-91), who infused religious enthusiasm with the principles of reason and democracy and who represented the sceptical face of Protestantism (dissenters rejected the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the idea of original sin and the concept of eternal damnation as irrational and untrue). It was also at Newington Green that Wollstonecraft was introduced to her future publisher, Joseph Johnson. A mere twelve months into her fledgling school’s existence, however, Wollstonecraft impulsively departed for Lisbon, Portugal, to nurse her newly married friend Fanny, whose husband had taken her to Europe in the hope of improving her delicate constitution. Sadly, when Fanny fell pregnant her health worsened, eventually with fatal consequences. Wollstonecraft’s school, which had failed in her absence, was closed on her return to England in 1786; however, although her attempt to save her friend was in vain, she would later use elements of Fanny’s story in her novel, Mary. A Fiction.

Seeking a new means of subsistence, Wollstonecraft embarked in the following year on her first book, an educational treatise and conduct manual for young girls entitled Thoughts on the Education o f Daughters (1787). In the same year, she set out for Ireland to take up the post of governess to the children of Lord and Lady Kingsborough. As the wife of one of the richest landowners in the country, Lady Kingsborough’s luxurious lifestyle unwittingly provided Wollstonecraft with material for the scathing portrait she would later paint of aristocratic women in Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman. The ‘feathered race’ is one of Wollstonecraft’s favourite pejorative metaphors for the leisured lifestyle of women, represented at the top end of the scale by Lady Kingsborough, and slavishly followed at the lower by some among the aspirational bourgeoisie: ‘Confined [...] in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch’, as she scornfully puts it in Rights o f Woman (Works, vol. 5, p. 125).

Thoughts on the Education o f Daughters repeats the emphasis found in traditional contemporary literature for girls on the importance of domestic and religious virtue. The consolation of a religious sensibility is an abiding theme of Wollstonecraft’s early works. A sobering chapter on ‘The Benefits which Arise from Disappointments’ instructs girls and young women to sublimate their private, implicitly selfish pleasures, to reason and religious advancement:

But our passions will not contribute much to our bliss, till they are under the dominion of reason, andtill that reason is enlightened and improved. Then sighing will cease, and all tears will be wiped awayby that Being, in whose presence there is fullness of joy. (Works, vol. 4, p. 37)

Mary Wollstonecraft xvii

Even here, however, in the conservatism of the injunction on girls to repress their passion, it is possible to detect the kernel of an Enlightenment feminist perspective in Wollstonecraft’s representation of reason as, at root, un-gendered and capable of improvement.

Wollstonecraft had departed in disgrace from the Kingsborough household in August 1787 on account of what she perceived as Lady Kingsborough’s intense - and irrational - rivalry with her over the attentions of Lord Kingsborough. Certainly, there was nothing to substantiate the allegation although the episode was later used against Wollstonecraft, adding to the slurs on her name caused by Godwin’s scandalous Memoirs. In London, in 1788, she became involved with the so-called Godwinian circle of intellectuals and artists grouped round the radical London publisher Joseph Johnson with whose support she now began her professional career, working as an editorial assistant and reviewer on his and Thomas Christie’s periodical the Analytical Review between the years 1788 and 1797. As a reviewer, Wollstonecraft could be both gently satirical and uncompromisingly stem; in the latter mode, she famously directed her ire at the formulaic feminine fictions which flooded the late eighteenth-century print market. She repeatedly censured ‘flimsy novels’ (Contributions to the Analytical Review, 1788-1797, Works, vol. 7, p. 191), as she put it, which offered ‘neither instruction nor amusement’ (ibid., p. 174), and, worse, encouraged young women to entertain ridiculous romantic fantasies with little relation to the world. In like manner, in the Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman, she deplores ‘the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retailed in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties’ {Works, vol. 5, p. 256). Wollstonecraft’s reviews of contemporary female novelists rarely spare the lash. Indeed, she is almost universally disapproving of contemporary female writers (that the majority of women are imperfect in the present scheme of things is an abiding theme of the Rights o f Woman), although she makes a notable exception for the Whig historian, educational writer, and bluestocking Catherine Macaulay Graham (1731-91) whom she praises for transcending the limitations of her sex. In her review for the Analytical Review of Macaulay’s Letters on Education: with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (1790), Wollstonecraft admiringly describes the author as a ‘masculine and fervid writer’ (Works, vol. 7, p. 309), commending her for having ‘turned the very superior powers of her mind to the consideration of a subject, which, perhaps, embraces a wider circle of unsettled opinions, than most of those disputed points that have exercised the argumentative talents of ancient philosophers and modem theologians’ (ibid.).

Lrom a modem standpoint it may seem strange that Wollstonecraft uses ‘masculine’ as the gendered adjective of approbation for a woman writer, but it is important to register that, in doing so, she challenges the contemporary assumption that biological sex determines how a woman should write. Accordingly, she signals her conviction, which Macaulay shared, that in terms of the intellect there is ‘No characteristic difference in sex' (ibid., p. 314).

The Analytical apart, a fuller response to the ‘reveries of stupid novelists’ came in the form of Wollstonecraft’s own attempt at a new type of fiction, one in which, in her words, ‘the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers is displayed’ (Works, vol. 1, p. 5). Mary A Fiction (1788), a title in which the word ‘Liction’ differentiates it from the meretricious contrivances of sentimental novels of the day, is described in the preface as ‘an artless tale, without episodes’ (ibid.). As with much of her writing, Wollstonecraft claims to take her material from nature, which she calls ‘the original source’ (ibid.), rather than social custom

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or manners. The eponymous heroine is sensitive and intelligent (rather like Wollstonecraft herself); she is called a ‘genius’, which means a woman who thinks for herself (again, like Wollstonecraft). On the death of her brother, Mary is - at the age of seventeen - an heiress, and the hitherto ignored daughter becomes important as a pawn in her father’s dynastic plan. She is for this reason married to Charles, a typical young gallant whom she does not know and cares for not at all. Immediately following the marriage ceremony Charles departs on the ‘Grand Tour’ of Continental Europe traditionally taken by young gentlemen. On his return, Mary grows to despise his ignorance and detest his ‘Gothic’ licentiousness. (Charles offers her sexually to his best friend.) But even before her husband reveals his worst colours, Mary, who expands her mind in the manner of a young Wollstonecraft, reflects that marriage is a ‘heavy yoke’ (Mary. A Fiction, Works, vol. 7, p. 22).

On the other hand, Wollstonecraft knew too well the obstacles that faced an unmarried woman in pursuit of emotional fulfilment. The solution seems to have lain for her, at least in part, in forming intense platonic relationships. At Newington Green she was drawn to James Hewlitt, a fellow schoolteacher, who, to her regret, married a woman she considered his intellectual inferior by far. A second intense intellectual relationship with another married man, the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) (best known for his macabre, sexually-charged painting ‘The Nightmare’, 1781) culminated in Wollstonecraft’s unconventional proposal in 1792 that she live with him and his wife as his spiritual partner. Needless to say Fuseli’s wife vetoed the proposed menage a trois.

As befits the role of a professional author, Wollstonecraft quickly expanded her range and in 1788, the same year that Mary was published, she contributed to the burgeoning late eighteenth-century market for educational works for children with Original Stories from Real Life, illustrated by William Blake, as well as translating from the French O f the Importance o f Religious Opinions by the future French revolutionary Jacques Necker. There followed in the stormy revolutionary year of 1789 a rather traditional compilation of extracts in prose and verse entitled The Female Reader. This was hack work certainly (Johnson published it as by ‘Mr Creswick, Teacher of Elocution’, presumably because the professional title of teacher was a good marketing device) and yet one which in its selection of edifying texts - devotional passages from the Bible which emphasize humanitarian concerns and advice to young misses to subordinate ‘Dress’ to ‘useful purposes’ - introduces questions about female behaviour which might be seen as pre-empting the issues raised - albeit in a distinctly more radical mode - in the later Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman.

Early in 1790, Wollstonecraft developed her craft as a professional author with a translation (published in two volumes) of a Dutch conduct work by Madame de Cambon entitled Young Grandison. A Series o f Letters from Young Persons to their Friends. This, as its title suggests, was based on - and indeed traded upon - the success of Samuel Richardson’s elephantine seven-volume moral epistolary novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54). Wollstonecraft (although her name was not put to the work) abridged and remodelled the original ‘to render it more extensively useful’ and avoid ‘narrow prejudices’ that ‘cramp the understanding, or make it submit to any other authority than that of reason’ (Young Grandison, Works, vol 2, p. 215). Wollstonecraft’s name did, however, appear on her next and final translation, Elements o f Morality, for the Use o f Children: with an Introductory Address to Parents, published late in 1790 and reprinted with illustrations in 1791. This was taken from Moralisches elementarbuch (1782), a fictionalized conduct work by the German author Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, of

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whose views Wollstonecraft approved. She corresponded with Salzman, and he later repaid the compliment by translating into German both Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman and Godwin’s Memoirs.

In November 1790, the renowned Anglo-Irish orator and Parliamentarian Edmund Burke published his antipathetic Reflections on the Revolution in France, an eloquent defence of monarchical and hereditary power. The counter-arguments came thick and fast from those in England who supported the French struggle to overthrow the corrupt Ancien Regime. Two of the most radical challenges thrown down to Burke, Thomas Paine’s Rights o f Man (1791-2) and William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), have since become classic works of political philosophy, but it was Wollstonecraft’s response to Burke in her Vindication o f the Rights o f Men, published in 1791, which was the first defence of the Revolution to appear. Propelled by furious indignation, she wrote quickly, sending the pages to press as she completed them, so that the book came out just twenty-nine days after Burke’s. The first edition was published anonymously but Wollstonecraft’s name did appear on a second edition, published three weeks later, and this marked the beginning of her career proper as a social and political theorist.

Wollstonecraft confronted Burke on his own ground, namely his defence of historical precedent and tradition as justification for dynastic property laws in France and the legitimacy of the monarchical and aristocratic order. Here she was influenced by the work of two key political theorists, the aforementioned Dr Richard Price and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). Price, the distinguished dissenting minister, whom Wollstonecraft had briefly known during the last decade of his life, celebrated the French Revolution’s promise of individual and religious liberty in his Discourse on the Love o f our Country (1789), the text that prompted Burke’s venomous ad hominem attack in the Reflections. For Price, individual passions become morally admirable when they are transformed by reason into a universal benevolence that seeks to mirror that of the Creator. Emotion fused with reason and benevolence is thus the theological bedrock of social reform. Price’s detractor Burke, however, interpreted such sentiments as motivated more by political extremism than religious philosophy, and he opened his Reflections with a clever exercise in character assassination by association, identifying him with a host of revolutionary thinkers, represented as confused and dangerous ‘literary caballers, and intriguing philosophers ... political theologians, and theological politicians, both at home and abroad’ (Burke, 1790, p. 13).

In the opening pages of her reply to Burke, Wollstonecraft questioned Burke’s moral standing by drawing attention to what she deemed to be his own confused values. She accuses Burke of misguidedly casting opprobrium on the elderly Dr Price and allowing himself to be seduced by the vapid beauty of the young French queen:

Granting, for a moment, that Dr Price’s political opinions are Utopian reveries, and that the world is not yet sufficiently civilized to adopt such a sublime system of morality; they could, however, only be the reveries of a benevolent mind. Tottering on the verge of the grave, that worthy man in his whole life never dreamt of struggling for power or riches; and, if a glimpse of the glad dawn of liberty rekindled the fire of his youth in his veins, you, who could not stand the fascinating glance of a great lady’s eyes, when neither virtue nor sense beamed in them, might have pardoned his unseemly transport, - if such it must be deemed. (Rights o f Men, Works, vol. 5, p. 18)

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The identification of corrupt political and sexual relations with the luxury and indolence of the old court culture, epitomized for her by the dissolute French queen, is part of Wollstonecraft’s wider attack on Burke’s defence of the inherited wealth and privileges of the aristocracy. It would also feed into her vision in Rights o f Woman of a future of female equality enabled by social progress and the abolition of privilege based on distinctions of inherited rank.

Taken together, Rights o f Men and the more famous Rights o f Woman have widened Wollstonecraft’s appeal beyond any single academic discipline or school of thought. Rights o f Woman crosses many disciplinary concerns and boundaries: it has been read variously as a political treatise on rights, a work of education and moral conduct, a liberal-humanist philosophical tract, a study in female sexuality, a serious work of religious thought and, perhaps above all, a revolutionary treatise in manners. The essays collected here represent the history of the reception of this ground-breaking work and of Wollstonecraft’s social and political thought in general.

She began Rights o f Woman in 1791, in the year of the new (and from a feminist perspective) retrograde French Constitution that excluded women from political public life, according citizens’ rights only to men over 25. It was also the year during which Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord issued a report on education to the National Assembly which called for free education for children of both sexes with the proviso that the education of girls should be directed towards domestic roles. As with her direct response to Burke in Rights o f Men, so Wollstonecraft opened Rights o f Woman with an appeal to Talleyrand (to whom the book is dedicated) to reconsider his views on female education in the light of the argument she makes for women’s inclusion as the intellectual and moral equals of men in what she terms ‘the natural rights of mankind’. The book as a whole can be read as a broader substantiation of that revolutionary claim.

Rights o f Woman was published in January 1792. In December of that year, following the rejection of her misjudged proposal to live with Fuseli and his wife, Wollstonecraft set off alone for Paris to write her first-hand account of the Revolution there, sketched as a ‘Series of Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation’. She arrived in Paris during the first days of the trial of the king and was there at the time of his execution on 11 January 1793, a crime against humanity that she found psychologically traumatic but which did not dim her support for the ideals of the Revolution. It did, however, put an end to her letter-writing project (recording Revolutionary atrocities proved too painful). The project was possibly also stifled by her beginning a love affair with the aforesaid Imlay, with whom she spent an Elysian summer of isolation from the troubles of Paris in Neuilly, then a village outside the capital. On returning to Paris she was pregnant with Imlay’s child and unmarried (she carried a certificate from the American Embassy in Paris showing that Imlay had registered her as his wife, thus protecting her from the dangers of being an enemy alien, but the document had no legal status). As Imlay departed for Le Havre to see to his business speculations, on one of what would be many long absences, Wollstonecraft began afresh with her record of events in France, which, to quote the title of her resulting book, offered An Historical and Moral View o f the Origin and Progress o f the French Revolution; and the Effect it has produced in Europe (published by Johnson in 1794).

The Historical and Moral View is a reasoned argument for the necessity of revolution to occur at a gradual pace: ‘The revolutions of states ought to be gradual; for during violent or material changes it is not so much the wisdom of measures, as the popularity they acquire by

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being adapted to the foibles of the great body of the community, which gives them success’ (Works, vol. 6, p. 166). Wollstonecraft argues with hindsight that the sudden pace of the seismic turn of events in France was responsible for the country’s descent from its lofty revolutionary ideals of 1789 into the atrocities of the 1793 ‘Terror’ and the commencement of war with Great Britain. Her desire for moderate change is reflected in the calm, philosophical approach of her own writing. She aims, as she puts it in the preface to her book, to survey French history ‘with the cool eye of observation’ (ibid., p. 6), which is to say a philosophical eye, and to produce a narrative of French civilization and social progress incorporating the changing condition of women. It is a project that once again freed her from the conventional generic restrictions on the woman writer and moved her into the orbit of the male historian, notably the sphere inhabited by the leading male historians and philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment - Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson and Hugh Blair - to whom her ‘impersonal’ historical methodology is largely indebted.

Wollstonecraft’s ‘cool eye’, however, is also a personal ‘I’. As with all her writing, she rarely keeps herself out of the narrative, her frequent and lively digressions giving colour to what the Monthly Review called a ‘solidity and depth of thought’ that is ‘truly philosophical’. In blending personal observation into detached historical narrative, Wollstonecraft might be seen to appropriate the language of the male philosophical Scottish Enlightenment and make it her own.

An Historical and Moral View appeared in 1794. It was followed almost immediately by the birth in May that year of Wollstonecraft and Imlay’s illegitimate daughter Fanny, in Le Havre, to where Wollstonecraft, now free from the obligations of her book, had travelled from Paris to spend some precious time with her erstwhile ‘husband’. Just less than a year later she returned to London, in April 1795, with her infant daughter, distraught. During the intervening eleven months Wollstonecraft had repeatedly pleaded with Imlay, in desperate letters, which followed him round the country, to put aside the business affairs that took him away from his new family and return to her side. Her appeals went largely unheeded and, unable to bear the agonizing uncertainty of Imlay’s affection, she swallowed enough laudanum to endanger her life.

When William Godwin published Wollstonecraft’s private ‘Letters to Imlay’ in the final volume of his 1798 Posthumous Works o f the Author o f A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman in Four Volumes he unwittingly lit the fuse of a widespread conservative backlash in Britain against revolutionary ideals of social and sexual reform. The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine gleefully seized upon the ‘Letters’ as evidence of Wollstonecraft’s ‘whoredom’, describing her as Imlay’s ‘concubine’, ridiculing her as everything but a ‘rational’ woman. Even the politically moderate European Magazine called her ‘a philosophical wanton’. The opprobrium was widespread and Wollstonecraft’s reputation took a long while to recover from the derision she posthumously endured as a consequence of the revelation of her sexual passion and emotional dependency. Godwin’s presentation of her sometimes febrile emotions would have been an acceptable, even appealing, portrait of femininity, in tune with the sexual stereotypes of the day, were it not for the obvious paradox that this was Wollstonecraft speaking, the ‘hyena in petticoats’ (Tomalin 1974), as Horace Walpole unkindly dubbed her.

Only at the close of the nineteenth century, when the ‘Woman Question’ was once again on the political agenda was Wollstonecraft’s writing taken seriously; it would be still another century before her work was rehabilitated by the mainstream of academic and feminist debate

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of the 1970s and ’80s. However, there were those brave few among her contemporaries (mainly the Romantic male poets) who would not be cowed by convention and championed her in their verse. Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth all wrote poems to or about her, while the younger poet-radical Shelley expressed his admiration in part by falling in love with her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Mary Shelley paid her own literary homage to the mother she hardly knew except through her writing, which she was encouraged by Godwin to admire, in the dramatic plot of her novel Frankenstein (1818). The story closes with the monster’s self-imposed exile in the cold climes of northern Europe, silently echoing Mary Shelley’s own mother’s exilic retreat to Scandinavia, a journey recounted in Wollstonecraft’s epistolary travel book Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796).

A Short Residence was Wollstonecraft’s most popular work during her lifetime and in succeeding decades. Its many admirers included Mary and Percy Shelley, who took a copy with them when they happily eloped to France in 1814 - which is paradoxical, perhaps, since the book emerged from Wollstonecraft’s very unhappiness and was written in the depths of her doomed love affair with Imlay. Maybe to gain a temporary respite from her emotional imprecations, but also, presumably, because he valued her intellectual and practical capabilities, Imlay had sent his increasingly demanding ‘wife’ to Scandinavia in June 1795 (a dangerous time to travel overseas given the ongoing naval hostilities between Britain and France) to conduct business on his behalf. The autobiographical trait of much of Wollstonecraft’s writing is at its most pronounced here: ‘I found I could not avoid being continually the first person - “the little hero of each tale’” , is how her editorial preface introduces Letters Written During a Short Residence (Works, vol. 6, p. 241). A series of twenty-six epistles detail from a self­consciously personal standpoint Wollstonecraft’s impression of the landscape, the customs and the people she encountered.

Melancholic personal reflection blended with literary Romantic travelogue, Letters Written During a Short Residence entranced readers with its vivid portrait of a sublime landscape and its memorable depiction of a mysteriously abandoned woman. The poet Southey’s response was typical. As Richard Holmes notes, upon reading the Letters, Southey ‘wrote excitedly to his publisher friend Joseph Cottle: “Have you met with Mary Wollstonecraft’s [travel book]? She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight’ (Holmes, 1987, p. 17).

Wollstonecraft added Norway, with its glassy ijords, towering waterfalls and pine-studded forests, to the list of sublime sights that inspired the Romantic poets. Each of the letters is addressed to an unnamed correspondent (Imlay), who, it becomes apparent over the course of the volume, is partly responsible for her melancholic frame of mind. Coleridge’s haunting image from ‘Kubla Khan’ of the solitary woman ‘wailing for her demon-lover’ has been sourced to Wollstonecraft’s tale of abandonment and it is certainly the case that her self- portrait of a sensitive, emotionally distressed, solitary woman can be seen as a forerunner of the iconic image of the suffering woman that lies at the heart of some aspects of the poetic Romantic tradition (Holmes, 1987, p. 41).

On returning to Fondon in September 1795, Wollstonecraft received fresh proof of Imlay’s infidelity. She responded by throwing herself into the Thames, having sewn stones into the hem of her skirts in effort to secure success and swifter drowning. She was pulled from the closing waters, however, and on her recovery she finally terminated her connection with Imlay.

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The New Year brought a party at the house of the novelist Mary Hays and a meeting with Godwin. By April 1796, Wollstonecraft and Godwin were lovers; early during the following year Wollstonecraft found herself pregnant with the author of Frankenstein and in March 1797 she married Godwin at St Pancras church, London.

Confident of an unproblematic birth, Wollstonecraft chose to deliver her child at home attended by a midwife. The end result was the mother’s tragic death from blood poisoning. Following the loss of his wife, Godwin immersed himself in the preparation of his Memoirs of Wollstonecraft and in the task of collecting her works for publication in his edition of her Posthumous Works. Included therein is Wollstonecraft’s significant second novel, composed in 1796 but with the conclusion unfinished at the author’s death. The Wrongs o f Woman; or, Maria. A Fragment is a major contribution to the history of the Jacobin novel in English. It recounts the fate of Maria, a woman who is confined in a lunatic asylum by her profligate and drunken husband on his discovery of her plan to flee France with their infant daughter. Thus bastilled, she forms a romantic attachment with a fellow inmate, who ultimately proves to be as treacherous as Wollstonecraft’s real-life lover, Imlay. Maria also befriends her warder, a former prostitute, whose story of suffering ignites her sympathy, leading her to consider - and the reader to ponder - the universal, legal, domestic and emotional oppression of the female sex. Ill-treated by a vicious husband, oppressed by a prejudicial legal system that did not admit women the right to sue for divorce, and betrayed by a faithless lover, Maria’s only choice is to take her life or live for her daughter in isolation from the world. A tale so defiant of the expected happy ending of the conventional novel did not win many admirers in its day. Subsequently, however, the work has been read as a fictional version of the planned second (unwritten) volume of Rights o f Woman that Wollstonecraft announced would deal with the injustices of the British legal system and the Taws respecting woman’ (Works, vol. 5, p. 215).

* * *

The essays in this collection represent the range and diversity of scholarly interest in Wollstonecraft since the late nineteenth century, the moment when her reputation, which had been cloaked in obliquity and scandal for decades after her death, was recovered. They are organized into three parts.

Survey of the Work and Reputation

Part I examines the reputation of Mary Wollstonecraft. It opens with the recuperation by George Eliot (1819-80) of Wollstonecraft for mid-nineteenth-century readers in an 1855 review, for The Leader, of the American author Margaret Fuller’s conduct book Woman in the Nineteenth Century. What begins as a comparative review of Fuller’s work leads into a comparison with and, more strongly, a defence of Wollstonecraft’s Rights o f Woman. Silently redressing the perception of the book in the wake of Godwin’s Memoirs as a scandalous text unfit for any respectable lady reader, Eliot presents the work as ‘eminently serious’ and ‘severely moral’ (Chapter 1, p. 3 below). By the same token she declares that the much-vilified Wollstonecraft is a sober, moral and rational thinker: she is, in Eliot’s words, ‘nothing if not rational’ (ibid.). Indeed, it is difficult not to detect in Eliot’s portrait of the author a mirroring

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of her own image as an intellectual woman - a woman possessed of a strong sense of her own reasoning powers and, to quote Eliot, 4a loving woman’s heart’ (ibid.).

Among the great literary women and polemicists to follow in Eliot’s footsteps is the anarchist feminist activist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) and the Modernist novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) both of whom are represented here. In ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Struggle for Freedom’ (Chapter 2), Goldman pictures a rebellious woman on to whose visionary spirit she (as with Eliot before her) projects her own self. Goldman’s Wollstonecraft is a Shelleyan creature, who ‘could soar through space, her spirit reaching out to great heights’ (p. 12 below) yet it is this same search for the ideal - for freedom and love - that brings her crashing back down to earth and the messy contradictions of a life lived in defiance of convention. As Goldman puts it: ‘Life without love for a character like Mary is inconceivable, and it was her search and yearning for love which hurled her against the rock of inconsistency and despair’ (p. 14 below).

Goldman evidently does not run shy of the perceived irregularities in Wollstonecraft’s personal life that so shocked many of her readers. Indeed, it is Wollstonecraft’s contradictions, so to speak, that make her such a compelling a figure for that other great female polemicist of the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf. In her short essay ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, published in 1932 (here Chapter 3), Woolf writes approvingly of her subject:

‘The life of such a woman was bound to be tempestuous. Every day she made theories by which life should be lived; and every day she came smack against the rock of other people’s prejudices. Every day too - for she was no pedant, no cold-blooded theorist - something was born in her that thrust aside her theories and forced her to model them afresh, (p. 20 below)

The 1970s saw another revival of interest in the Mary Wollstonecraft. It is a striking feature of this body of work that the interest falls on the writing and on Wollstonecraft’s reception history rather more than her life. In a 1978 corrective to the view that Rights o f Woman was in its day a cause of the scandal which subsequently surrounded the author, Regina Janes argues that reviews of the day were almost universally untroubled by the book’s central thesis, which was taken to be an argument for improving the educational - and thereafter the social - lot of women. Janes asserts that there was not an anti-feminist movement at large in Britain in the 1790s, ‘[i]f we take feminism to mean anxiety for the education of women and the improvement of their minds’ (Chapter 4, p.29 below). Accordingly, reaction against ‘feminist’ ideas cannot be held responsible for the collapse of Wollstonecraft’s reputation; rather Janes attributes her downfall to ‘two separate events: the course of the revolution in France and consequent repudiation of the vocabulary of revolution in England; and Godwin’s publication of her posthumous works, including Maria Or The Wrongs o f Woman and his Memoirs o f the Author o f a Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman' (ibid.). While Janes attends to the reception of Wollstonecraft’s writing, Gary Kelly, in ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Texts and Contexts’ (Chapter 5), focuses on the influences that shaped the writing itself. Wollstonecraft emerges from Kelly’s detailed contextual literary criticism as a ‘pre-Romantic’ author, a version of her that is best represented, he argues, in Godwin’s Memoirs, which deserve to be admired as a serious analysis of a literary life and taken as the model for subsequent Wollstonecraft criticism.

Part I concludes with Sylvana Tomaselli’s review of the publication in 1989 of Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler’s scholarly edition in seven volumes of The Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft. The edition brought newly to light the tremendous reach of Wollstonecraft’s intellect and

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issues. Following on from her insights on that edition, Tomaselli, in ‘Remembering Mary Wollstonecraft on the Bicentenary of the Publication of A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman\ calls on scholars to investigate more closely the ‘precise content of Wollstonecraft’s feminism’ (Chapter 6, p. 39 below), an exercise that would in part correct what she argues is the relative neglect of the religious element of Rights o f Woman. Tomaselli reminds us that ‘A secular theory of rights of the kind widely endorsed today would simply have been theoretically groundless in her [Wollstonecraft’s] view’ (p. 41 below).

Contexts: History, Politics, Culture

Part II offers a representative selection of mainly late twentieth-century essays on the separate but overlapping disciplinary interests of Wollstonecraft’s ouevre. The essays collected here are grouped under eight sub-headings that specify particular aspects of the historical, political and cultural contexts of Wollstonecraft’s writing.

Wollstonecraft and Social, Philosophical and Political Theory

G.J. Barker-Benfield’s opening essay, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-CenturyCommonwealthwoman’ (Chapter 7), pays sustained attention to the political context of the English dissenting tradition on Wollstonecraft’s writing, specifically her 1788 translation from the French of Jacques Necker’s O f the Importance o f Religious Opinions. In Barker- Benfield’s words: Necker ‘was seen by British Dissenters as a symbol of “the movement for the civil emancipation of the French Protestants’” (p. 53 below), a connection that should not be lost in appreciating Wollstonecraft’s own participation in English dissenting culture.

Next, Virginia Sapiro develops the philosophical context of Wollstonecraft’s thought. In ‘Wollstonecraft, Feminism and Democracy: “Being Bastilled’” . Sapiro urges the modem feminist political theorist not to depersonalize Wollstonecraft as a political theorist, because: ‘To understand the political act of political theorizing requires attending to the context of that act’ (Chapter 8, pp. 69-70 below). Saprio argues that the cultural and historically specific context of Wollstonecraft’s life experience is integral to the dilemmas, contradictions and blind spots that shaped her political theory. Of the latter, the most notable from a contemporary feminist perspective is the lack of distinction in her political theory between the private and the public individual: ‘For her, the meaning of virtue was indistinguishable between public and private life or among different kinds of lives. One cannot be a good person and bad citizen or a bad person and good citizen’ (p. 79). By the same token ‘It would probably make sense to Wollstonecraft that discussion of “private” pains within a particular oppressed social group could lead to a special form of enlightenment’ (p. 80); however, what she ‘did not seem to imagine was how this enlightenment might be translated into political action’ (ibid.) and into the development of the gender-based political movement that we now call feminism.

Taking up the debate around the public and the private individual in relation to Wollstonecraft’s literary writing, Simon Swift’s essay, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the “Reserve of Reason’” (Chapter 9), argues that, rather than being antithetical, the relation between reason and sentiment (the language of feeling) in her writing is highly equivocal. What Swift terms the ‘mobile power of imagination’ (p. 85 below) disrupts the key binary oppositions of public/private, reason/feeling and opens up the possibility for a complex investigation of the

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ways writers in the period - poets as well as the philosophers - seek to negotiate and regulate passion through a new literary expressivity.

Wollstonecraft, Gender and Enlightenment

Janet Todd reviews the conventional association of the reason/feeling divide with the binary opposition masculinity/femininity in her investigation of the playful construction of gendered voices in Wollstonecraft’s epistolary travel book, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Desire’ (Chapter 10), Todd proposes that the ‘feminine’ in this text is manifested as ‘the seducer with feminine wiles, the vulnerable romantic lover, and to a lesser extent the mother, while the masculine is implied in the natural enthusiast and the observer and calculator’ (p. 105 below). Her key point is that Wollstonecraft plays knowingly with this division in order to enlist the reader and sell copies of her book: ‘Less an antithesis of feeling and thought, emotion and reason, it is a play of strategies to create a seductive image, sell copies of the book, even perhaps get a man’ (ibid.). Some might argue that the strategy succeeded; Godwin was not alone in being ‘seduced’ by the feminine voice of the Letters, a seduction that Todd argues works at least in part through a narrative of secrecy. Why is the mother alone with her baby in Scandinavia? What or who is the source of her sorrow? In Todd’s reading, such questions simultaneously intrigue and enlist the (male) reader.

In Chapter 11, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, Sylvana Tomaselli seeks ‘to put women back in their place in history by examining a forgotten tradition which linked women, not, as is all too swiftly done, to nature, but to culture and the process of its historical development’ (p. 101 below). Tomaselli points out that some of the key French Enlightenment philosophers - Denis Diderot (1713-84) and Antoine-Leonard Thomas (1732-85) - alongside the Scottish physician William Alexander (d. 1783) and his co-patriot John Millar (1735-1801) all stressed women’s civilizing influence on society. She concludes: ‘Within this tradition therefore women were anything but the passive recipients of culture. Unlike the thesis which links woman to nature, the one we have been examining does not leave women hidden from history. Far from it. She makes it’ (p. 121 below).

Wollstonecraft, Education and Conduct Literature

Wollstonecraft’s importance in the development of theories of education and conduct is given particular prominence in nineteenth-century accounts of her work, in part as a way of downplaying her scandalous reputation but also and more specifically because her work spoke to the campaigns undertaken by respectable nineteenth-century women to broaden women’s educational and employment opportunities. The opening essay in this section, a chapter from Emma Rauschenbusch-Clough’s biography A Study o f Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights o f Woman (1898) was begun at the University of Leipzig, Germany, as a doctoral thesis and is among the first scholarly considerations of Wollstonecraft. In her chapter on ‘Education’ (reproduced here as Chapter 12), Rauschenbusch-Clough traces the influence on Wollstonecraft’s educational writings of Locke’s theory of the importance of sense impressions on a child’s education. She also examines the impact on Wollstoncraft’s thoughts of French Republican plans for a system of national education developed by Charles

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Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, the dedicatee of Rights o f Woman, who had recently issued a report on education to the French National Assembly calling for free education for children of both sexes.

If Rauschenbusch-Clough demonstrates Wollstonecraft’s connection to the tradition of European philosophy and educational theory, then Regina Janes, in Chapter 13, ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’, provides a similar service from the perspective of a female intellectual tradition. Jestingly, if contentiously, acknowledging: that ‘To speak of eighteenth-century feminism is to commit a vile anachronism’ (p. 159 below), Janes nonetheless provides a comparative reading of the condition of women in 1690 and 1790, and the responses of Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft respectively to the educational restrictions facing their sex, to suggest a continuity of shared concerns and dilemmas, albeit with different solutions. Then Vivien Jones, in ‘Advice and Enlightenment: Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education’, further explores the importance of Wollstonecraft’s educational thought in the context of contemporary sexual and medical manuals to produce a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the ‘complexities and contradictions of her feminism’ (Chapter 14, p. 179 below).

Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution

The essays in this section examine Wollstonecraft’s interaction with literary responses to the French Revolution of 1789. Tom Fumiss’s ‘Gender in Revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft’ (Chapter 15), analyses the sexual power politics encoded within the aesthetic and political treatises of Wollstonecraft’s antagonist, Edmund Burke. Wollstonecraft appears to Fumiss as a clever reader of the contradictions within Burkean philosophy and she shines, in his account, as one of Burke’s most able respondents. Next, Jane Rendall traces Wollstonecraft’s involvement with the Revolution debate through an examination of her engagement with, and debt to, the contemporary historical writing of the Scottish philosophers. In Chapter 16, “‘The Grand Causes which Combine to Carry Mankind Forward”: Wollstonecraft, History and Revolution’, (1997), Rendall argues that Wollstonecraft’s conviction that the happiness of society relies upon the development of an enlightened political science committed to the transformation of manners and social customs is indebted to middle-class British Whig historiography and Scottish Enlightenment philosophy.

Wollstonecraft and Religion

As steeped as Wollstonecraft was in the revolutionary politics of the age, she was equally immersed, as Mary Wilson Carpenter and Barbara Taylor demonstrate, in a dissenting religious sensibility. Wollstonecraft’s quotation, in chapter 3 of Rights o f Woman, from the Book of Job, the story of man’s birth from his mother’s womb, leads Carpenter, in her essay ‘Sibylline Apocalyptics: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman and Job’s Mother’s Womb’, to argue that she summons up an ‘alternate story of creation’ (Chapter 17, p. 249 below), a suppressed plot of female empowerment, to counter the claim of the dominant Western male culture that woman was bom of man. Carpenter interprets Rights o f Woman as a ‘prophetic’ text in which Wollstonecraft appropriates a biblical ideology and language of prophecy to envisage an alternate version of the creation myth and the role of woman.

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The example of Mary Wilson Carpenter apart, modem readers of Rights o f Woman have in general neglected the religious impulse of her work. Barbara Taylor observes ‘that of all aspects of Wollstonecraft’s thought it is her piety which has failed to speak to late twentieth- century feminists’ (Chapter 18, p. 263 below). Taylor’s essay ‘For the Love of God: Religion and the Erotic Imagination in Wollstonecraft’s Feminism’ corrects that absence and examines the historical significance of religion in Wollstonecraft’s thought; what Taylor calls in a later ground-breaking monograph her ‘feminist imagination’.

Wollstonecraft and Romanticism

An important strand of Wollstonecraft’s feminist imagination takes the form of what would now be termed a ‘Romantic’ literary sensibility. The appearance in 1987 of the first modem joint publication of A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs o f the Author o f ‘The Rights o f Woman \ edited by Richard Holmes, opened up for scholars and general readers alike the extent of Wollstonecraft’s engagement with literary Romanticism. The essays included here by Mitzi Myers, John Whale and Harriet Devine Jump develop readings of Wollstonecraft’s writing in terms of the philosophical preoccupations of Romanticism. Myers’s essay on ‘Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject’ (Chapter 19) suggests that Wollstonecraft’s first biography follows the philosophical tenets of a burgeoning genre of Romantic biography in Godwin’s representation of his subject as a unique, creative individual shaped by childhood experience and memory. Wollstonecraft, she suggests, ‘incarnates for Godwin intuitive imagination, the alternate cognitive mode of romantic genius’ (p. 302 below).

In ‘Death in the Face of Nature: Self, Society and Body in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’ (Chapter 20), John Whale, extends an examination of the author’s Romantic subjectivity into what he sees as Wollstonecraft’s paradoxical mixture of an intense faith in social improvement, her ‘perfectibilist optimism’, and her equally intense ‘vision of chaos and indifference which lies on the other side of her ideas of “civilization” and “improvement”’ (p. 305 below). The literary influence of Wollstonecraft’s travel book on some of her poetic contemporaries, Coleridge and Wordsworth most notably, is explored in Harriet Devine Jump’s essay “‘No Equal Mind”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Young Romantics’ (Chapter 21). In none of the historical traditions of British travel-related writing preceding Wollstonecraft’s work was introspective self-analysis particularly evident. It is this aspect of her writing, however, that dominates Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and which largely explains the admiring references in the journals or correspondence of Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth and Hazlitt and, in several instances, the echoing in their verse of her very words.

Wollstonecraft, Femininity/Sexuality/Feminism

Rights o f Woman initiates a debate about female education that is intricately linked to Wollstonecraft’s argument about the dangers of female eroticism, a thesis that also informs her belief that marriage is properly a union cemented by friendship and the duties of parenthood - to the exclusion of sexual passion. She calmly contends:

Mary Wollstonecraft xxix

Were women more rationally educated, could they take a more comprehensive view of things, they would be contented to love but once in their lives; and after marriage calmly let passion subside into friendship - into that tender intimacy, which is the best refuge from care; yet is built on such pure, still affections, that idle jealousies would not be allowed to disturb the discharge of the sober duties of life, or to engross the thoughts that ought to be otherwise employed. (Rights o f Woman, Works, vol. 5, p. 189)

Despite Wollstonecraft’s qualification elsewhere in Rights o f Woman that T only exclaim against the sexual desire of conquest when the heart is out of the question’ (ibid., p. 125), her cold-water approach in general to matters sexual provoked, in the 1980s, a debate among academic feminist literary critics which persists to this day. In Cora Kaplan’s memorable phrase from her influential essay ‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism’ (reproduced here as Chapter 22), ‘Wollstonecraft sets up heartbreaking conditions for women’s liberation - a little death, the death of desire, the death of female pleasure’ (pp. 340^11 below). Barbara Taylor elaborates upon Kaplan’s observation in another influential essay on the subject of Wollstonecraft and sexuality, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism’ (here Chapter 23), which develops a persuasive case for interpreting Wollstonecraft’s suspicion in Rights o f Woman towards feminine sexuality as the inevitable consequence of her ‘wild wish’ to the see the sexual distinction in society abolished.

The concluding essay to this section, Gary Kelly’s ‘(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and Female Sexuality’ (Chapter 24), historicizes and contextualizes Wollstonecraft’s precepts on female sexuality with reference to contemporary property laws, which virtually disenfranchised married women, leading to Wollstonecraft’s rejection of the system of marriage as legalized prostitution, and her own personal situation. Against the prevailing opinion that ‘Wollstonecraft made a fool of herself over Imlay’, Kelly proposes that ‘she saw in Imlay and her relationship with him the sexual, domestic, and conjugal realisation of her female philosophy and the personal basis for sustaining her public and political dissemination of that philosophy’ (p. 389 below).

Wollstonecraft, Slavery and the Orient

Slavery is one of Wollstonecraft’s favourite metaphors for marriage yet the metonymic problematic of slavery itself has only recently been the subject of scholarly investigation. In Chapter 25, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery’, Moira Ferguson traces the extent of Wollstonecraft’s textual engagement with the slave trade, noting, for instance, that one of the earliest books she reviewed for the Analytical Review was the renowned narrative by a former African slave, The Interesting Narrative o f the Life o f Olaudah Equiano (1789), part of the abolition literature of the period with which Wollstonecraft would have been familiar. Ferguson’s analysis of Wollstonecraft’s ‘usage of colonial slavery as a reference point for female subjugation’, argues that the author was a ‘political pioneer, fundamentally altering the definition of rights and paving the way for a much wider cultural dialogue’ (p. 418 below).

X X X Mary Wollstonecraft

Texts: Novels, Literary Reviews, Letters

Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews

Part III opens with Sally N. Stewart’s account of ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to the Analytical Review’ (Chapter 26), an archival study of the range and type of review to flow from Wollstonecraft’s pen in the early years of her career as a professional writer. What is most striking from the perspective of Wollstonecraft’s vision of herself as a professional woman writer is her habit of signing her reviews with her initials, ‘M’ and ‘W’. As Stewart points out, ‘such an act was an assertion of her individuality and growing self-confidence as a female writer in a field previously dominated by males’ (p. 429 below). Wollstonecraft also used the letter ‘T’, a letter not linked to her own name, but which, in Stewart’s account, may have stood for ‘teacher’ and if so could be interpreted as yet another assertion of her authority.

Wollstonecraft’s Fictions - ‘Mary. A Fiction’ and ‘The Wrongs o f Woman; or, Maria. A Fragment’

While Wollstonecraft’s Vindication o f the Rights o f Men and Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman give voice to the author’s intellectual insights, allowing her to compete on a traditionally masculine terrain, it is possible, as Mary Poovey suggests here in Chapter 27, that ‘because her two political vindications were considered both “unladylike” and politically volatile, Wollstonecraft may have feared that her message would not reach those who most needed to hear it’ (p. 441 below), namely women. The relationship that Poovey identifies between Wollstonecraft and the novel, and most particularly the sentimental genre, is not an easy one. In her essay ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: The Gender of Genres in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, Poovey analyses the contradictions and hesitations that beset Wollstonecraft in her attempt to ‘reformulate the insights of A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman in a genre she felt certain could articulate her own emotion and attract a female audience - the sentimental novel’ (ibid.). The problem with the genre of sentimental fiction, Poovey argues, which we see Wollstonecraft wrestling with in both her fictions, is that the language of sentiment promoted the myth of an autonomous affective individualism that was itself scripted by the social text of bourgeois society. As Poovey puts it, ‘Sentimentalism was no more an effective solution to the spiritual impoverishment of bourgeois society than it was to the continuing political and economic injustices of the class system’ (p. 453 below).

Tilottama Rajan offers a more politically optimistic reading of Wollstonecraft’s fiction in her essay ‘Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel’ (Chapter 28). Rajan proposes that Wollstonecraft succeeded as a political novelist with her second attempt at fiction, The Wrongs o f Woman; or, Maria, by reformulating the characters and situations of her first novel, Mary, turning them in a revolutionary direction (as seen, for instance, in the character of Jemima, a figure reminiscent of the working-class radicalism of Blake’s Songs or the social conscience of the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth). And yet, argues Rajan, the real power of Wollstonecraft’s political fiction lies in the complex hermeneutics of her (unintentionally) unfinished novel. The broken-off ending, at a moment of crisis or climax, and Godwin’s subsequent insertion for publication of Wollstonecraft’s provisional conclusions turns the reader, in Raj an’s account, from an absorptive recipient of the narrative

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into a critical participant and makes interpretation the crux of the narrative. In a manner similar to the effect of Godwin’s revision of his own novel Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft’s readers are free ‘not to be locked into the text of things as they are’(p. 485 below).

Wollstonecraft’s Letters

The essays presented here focus on the interplay of the public and the private voice in Wollstonecraft’s published and unpublished letters. Mitzi Myers, in ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written ... in Sweden: Toward Romantic Autobiography’ (Chapter 29), argues that Wollstonecraft transformed the conventions of the eighteenth-century travel genre into a rationale for autobiographical revelation and in doing so charted a path, as Myers puts it, ‘from feminine romance to female Romanticism’ (p. 492 below). Janet Todd’s account of ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters’ in Chapter 30 focuses on the construction of selfhood in her private correspondence. ‘Her [Wollstonecraft’s] huge sense of the “I” is always believable and fully present’ (p. 514 below), writes Todd, which is quite unlike the ‘public quality’ of the sharp and witty letters of the bluestocking writers earlier in the century, and which taken as whole ‘form a remarkable autobiographical document. Unlike a diary or retrospective, they record not a finished ordered life but the dynamic process of living and experiencing, and inevitably they tell a tale no biography can truly match’ (p. 526 below).

Wollstonecraft’s Death

The story ends, appropriately, with Vivien Jones’s poignant and at times disturbing account of ‘The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft’ (Chapter 31). Personal horrors apart, Jones uncovers a feminist narrative of integrity and self-conviction in Wollstonecraft’s decision to have a home birth attended by Mrs E. Blenkensop, “‘Matron and Midwife” at the Westminster New Lying- in Hospital in Lambeth’ (p. 530 below); a decision made against the norm of the time, argues Jones, for urban, middle-class women to employ a man-midwife. (Man-midwives had been steadily taking over the midwifery profession since the 1740s.) Why, then, asks Jones, did Wollstonecraft deliberately buck this trend? She suggests that the answer to this question may lie in Wollstonecraft’s wish to avoid the possibility of being admitted to the General Lying- in Hospital, where one John Clarke was attendant physician. Clarke published his Practical essays on the management o f pregnancy and labour (1793) with Joseph Johnson, a somewhat progressive text that advocated Wollstonecraft’s own non-interventionist position but which also betrayed a belittling, and to Wollstonecraft offensive, view of women. Jones observes: ‘For Clarke, women are primarily the objects on whom enlightened “men of science” exercise their skill, rather than active participants in the process of birth, as Wollstonecraft’s Enlightenment feminist commitment to knowledge and control of the body would demand’ (p. 543 below).

If Wollstonecraft’s death is in one sense attributable to her adherence to an Enlightenment rationalist optimism in the power of women to control their minds and bodies, it is nevertheless a sign of her remarkable achievement that she is read today by students and scholars not just as a major figure in the history of Enlightenment political thought but as a writer who pushed back the boundaries of contemporary debate in so many other areas as well: education, literature, religion and politics among them. It is hoped that this volume of essays delivers to

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the reader the full range of Wollstonecraft’s achievement and the wide variety of contexts in which she wrote.

References

Burke, E. (1790), Reflections on the Revolution in France, London: J. Dodsley.Butler, M. (1989), ‘General Introduction’, in J. Todd and M. Butler (eds), The Works o f Mary

Wollstonecraft, Vol. 1, London: William Pickering, 1989, pp. 7-30.Fawcett, Mrs H. (ed.) (1891), ‘Introduction to the New Edition’, in M. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of

the Rights of the Woman, London: T. Fisher Unwin.Holmes, R. (1987), ‘Introduction’, in A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs o f the Author of ‘The

Rights o f Woman’, London: Penguin, pp. 9-55.Kelly, G. (1976), The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Kramnick, M. (ed.) ([1975] 1986), ‘Introduction’, in A Vindication of the Rights o f Woman,

Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 7-72.Taylor, B. (2003), Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Todd, J. and Butler, M. (eds) (1989), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols, London: William

Pickering.Tomalin, Claire (1974), The Life and Death o f Mary Wollstonecraft, London: Weidenfeld and |Nicolson,

pp. 142, 328, In.Wollstonecraft, M., A Vindication of the Rights o f Men (1791), in Todd and Butler (eds), The Works of

Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 5.---------, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in Todd and Butler (eds), The Works of Mary

Wollstonecraft, Vol. 5.---------, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), in Todd and Butler (eds), The

Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 6.---------, Contributions to the Analytical Review, 1788-1797, in Todd and Butler (eds), The Works of

Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 7.--------- (trans.), Elements o f Morality for the Use of Children: with an Introductory Address to

Parents (1790), from the German of C.G. Salzmann, in Todd and Butler (eds), The Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 2.

---------, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), in Toddand Butler (eds), The Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 6.

---------, Mary. A Fiction (1788), in Todd and Butler (eds), The Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 7.---------(trans.), Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788), from the French of J. Necker, in Todd

and Butler (eds), The Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 3.---------, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), in Todd and Butler (eds), The Works o f Mary

Wollstonecraft, Vol. 4.---------, The Female Reader (1789), in Todd and Butler (eds), The Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 4.---------, The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria. A Fragment (1798), in Todd and Butler (eds), The Works of

Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 1.---------, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), in Todd and Butler (eds), The Works o f Mary

Wollstonecraft, Vol. 4.---------, Young Grandison: A Series o f Letters from Young Persons to Their Friends (1790), in Todd and

Butler (eds), The Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 2.

Part ISurvey of the Work and Reputation

http://taylorandfrancis.com

[1]Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft*

by George Eliot

The dearth of new books just now gives us time to recur to less recent ones which we have hitherto noticed but slightly; and among these we choose the late edition of Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, because we think it has been unduly thrust into the background by less comprehensive and candid productions on the same subject. Notwithstanding certain defects of taste and a sort of vague spiritualism and grandiloquence which belong to all but the very best American writers, the book is a valuable one: it has the enthusiasm of a noble and sympathetic nature, with the moderation and breadth and large allowance of a vigorous and cultivated understanding. There is no exaggeration of woman’s moral excellence or intellectual capabilities; no injudicious insistence on her fitness for this or that function hitherto engrossed by men; but a calm plea for the removal of unjust laws and artificial restrictions, so that the possibilities of her nature may have room for full development, a wisely stated demand to disencumber her of the

Parasitic forms That seem to keep her up, but drag her down And leave her field to burgeon and to bloom From all within her, make herself her own To give or keep, to live and learn and be All that not harms distinctive womanhood.

It is interesting to compare this essay of Margaret Fuller’s published in its earliest form in 1843, with a work on the position of woman, written between sixty and seventy years ago - we mean Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights o f Woman. The latter work was not continued beyond the first volume; but so far as this carries the subject, the comparison, at least in relation to strong sense and loftiness of moral tone, is not at all disadvantageous to the woman of the last century. There is in some quarters a vague prejudice against the Rights o f Woman as in some way or other a reprehensible book, but readers who go to it with this impression will be surprised to find it eminently serious, severely moral, and withal rather heavy - the true reason, perhaps, that no edition has been published since 1796, and that it is now rather scarce. There are several points of resemblance, as well as of striking difference, between the two books. A strong understanding is present in both; but Margaret Fuller’s mind was like some regions of her own American continent, where you are constantly stepping from the sunny ‘clearings’ into the mysterious twilight of the tangled forest - she often passes in one breath from forcible reasoning to dreamy vagueness; moreover, her unusually varied culture gives her great command of illustration. Mary Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, is nothing if not rational; she has no erudition, and her grave pages are lit up by no ray of fancy. In both writers we discern, under the brave bearing of a strong and truthful nature, the beating of a loving woman’s heart, which teaches them not to undervalue the smallest offices of domestic

*This article was originally published in The Leader, 290, pp. 988-9.

4 M aij Wollstonecraft

care or kindliness. But Margaret Fuller, with all her passionate sensibility, is more of the literary woman, who would not have been satisfied without intellectual production; Mary Wollstonecraft, we imagine, wrote not at all for writing’s sake, but from the pressure of other motives. So far as the difference of date allows, there is a striking coincidence in their trains of thought; indeed, every important idea in the Rights o f Woman, except the combination of home education with a common day-school for boys and girls, reappears in Margaret Fuller’s essay.

One point on which they both write forcibly is the fact that, while men have a horror of such faculty or culture in the other sex as tends to place it on a level with their own, they are really in a state of subjection to ignorant and feeble-minded women. Margaret Fuller says:

Wherever man is sufficiently raised above extreme poverty or brutal stupidity, to care for the comforts of the fireside, or the bloom and ornament of life, woman has always power enough, if she chooses to exert it, and is usually disposed to do so, in proportion to her ignorance and childish vanity. Unacquainted with the importance of life and its purposes, trained to a selfish coquetry and love of petty power, she does not look beyond the pleasure of making herself felt at the moment, and governments are shaken and commerce broken up to gratify the pique of a female favorite. The English shopkeeper’s wife does not vote, but it is for her interest that the politician canvasses by the coarsest flattery.

Again:

All wives, bad or good, loved or unloved, inevitably influence their husbands from the power their position not merely gives, but necessitates of coloring evidence and infusing feelings in hours when the - patient, shall I call him? - is off his guard.

Hear now what Mary Wollstonecraft says on the same subject:

Women have been allowed to remain in ignorance, and slavish dependence, many, very many years, and still we hear of nothing but their fondness of pleasure and sway, their preference of rakes and soldiers, their childish attachment to toys, and the vanity that makes them value accomplishments more than virtues. History brings forward a fearful catalogue of the crimes which their cunning has produced, when the weak slaves have had sufficient address to over-reach their masters. . . . When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense; for, indirectly they obtain too much power, and are debased by their exertions to obtain illicit sway. . . . The libertinism, and even the virtues of superior men, will always give women of some description great power over them; and these weak women, under the influence of childish passions and selfish vanity, will throw a false light over the objects which the very men view with their eyes who ought to enlighten their judgment. Men of fancy, and those sanguine characters who mostly hold the helm of human affairs in general, relax in the society of women; and surely I need not cite to the most superficial reader of history the numerous examples of vice and oppression which the private intrigues of female favorites have produced; not to dwell on the mischief that naturally arises from the blundering interposition of well-meaning folly. For in the transactions o f business it is much better to have to deal with a knave than a fool, because a knave adheres to some plan; and any plan o f reason may be seen through much sooner than a sudden flight of folly. The power which vile and foolish women have had over wise men who possessed sensibility is notorious.

There is a notion commonly entertained among men that an instructed woman, capable of having opinions, is likely to prove an unpracticable yoke-fellow, always pulling one way

Mary Wollstonecraft 5

when her husband wants to go the other, oracular in tone, and prone to give curtain lectures on metaphysics. But surely, so far as obstinacy is concerned, your unreasoning animal is the most unmanageable of creatures, where you are not allowed to settle the question by a cudgel, a whip and bridle, or even a string to the leg. For our own parts, we see no consistent or commodious medium between the old plan of corporal discipline and that thorough education of women which will make them rational beings in the highest sense of the word. Wherever weakness is not harshly controlled it must govern, as you may see when a strong man holds a little child by the hand, how he is pulled hither and thither, and wearied in his walk by his submission to the whims and feeble movements of his companion. A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, will be ready to yield in trifles. So far as we see, there is no indissoluble connection between infirmity of logic and infirmity of will, and a woman quite innocent of an opinion in philosophy, is as likely as not to have an indomitable opinion about the kitchen. As to airs of superiority, no woman ever had them in consequence of true culture, but only because her culture was shallow or unreal, only as a result of what Mrs. Malaprop well calls ‘the ineffectual qualities in a woman’ - mere acquisitions carried about, and not knowledge thoroughly assimilated so as to enter into the growth of the character.

To return to Margaret Fuller, some of the best things she says are of the folly of absolute definitions of women’s nature and absolute demarcations of woman’s mission. ‘Nature’, she says, ‘seems to delight in varying the arrangements as if to show that she will be fettered by no rule; and we must admit the same varieties that she admits’. Again: ‘If nature is never bound down, nor the voice of inspiration stifled, that is enough. We are pleased that women should write and speak, if they feel need of it, from having something to tell; but silence for ages would be no misfortune, if that silence be from divine command, and not from men’s tradition.’ And here is a passage, the beginning of which has been often quoted:

If you ask me what offices they [women] may fill, I reply - any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will. I do not doubt there are women well fitted for such an office, and, if so, I should be as glad as to welcome the Maid of Saragossa, or the Maid of Missolonghi, or the Suliote heroine, or Emily Plater. I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers.. . . In families that I know, some little girls like to saw wood, others to use carpenters’ tools. Where these tastes are indulged, cheerfulness and good-humor are promoted. Where they are forbidden, because ‘such things are not proper for girls’, they grow sullen and mischievous. Fourier had observed these wants of women, as no one can fail to do who watches the desires of little girls, or know the ennui that haunts grown women, except where they make to themselves a serene little world by art of some kind. He, therefore, in proposing a great variety of employments, in manufactures or the care of plants and animals, allows for one-third of women as likely to have a taste for masculine pursuits, one-third of men for feminine. . . . I have no doubt, however, that a large proportion of women would give themselves to the same employments as now, because there are circumstances that must lead them. Mothers will delight to make the nest soft and warm. Nature would take care of that; no need to clip the wings of any bird that wants to soar and sing, or finds in itself the strength of pinion for a migratory flight unusual to its kind. The difference would be that all need not be constrained to employments for which some are unfit.

A propos of the same subject, we find Mary Wollstonecraft offering a suggestion which the women of the United States have already begun to carry out. She says:

6 Mary Wollstonecraft

Women, in particular, all want to be ladies, which is simply to have nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot tell what. But what have women to do in society? I may be asked, but to loiter with easy grace; surely you would not condemn them all to suckle fools and chronicle small beer. No. Women might certainly study the art o f healing, and be physicians as well as nurses. . . . Business of various kinds they might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly manner. . . . Women would not then marry for a support, as men accept of places under government, and neglect the implied duties.

Men pay a heavy price for their reluctance to encourage self-help and independent resources in women. The precious meridian years of many a man of genius have to be spent in the toil of routine, that an ‘establishment’ may be kept up for a woman who can understand none of his secret yearnings, who is fit for nothing but to sit in her drawing-room like a doll-Madonna in her shrine. No matter. Anything is more endurable than to change our established formulae about women, or to run the risk of looking up to our wives instead of looking down on them. Sit divus, dummodo non sit vivus (let him be a god, provided he be not living), said the Roman magnates of Romulus; and so men say of women, let them be idols, useless absorbents of previous things, provided we are not obliged to admit them to be strictly fellow-beings, to be treated, one and all, with justice and sober reverence.

On one side we hear that women’s position can never be improved until women themselves are better, and, on the other, that women can never become better until their position is improved - until the laws are made more just, and a wider field opened to feminine activity. But we constantly hear the same difficulty stated about the human race in general. There is a perpetual action and reaction between individuals and institutions; we must try and mend both by little and little - the only way in which human things can be mended. Unfortunately, many over-zealous champions of women assert their actual equality with men - nay, even their moral superiority to men - as a ground for their release from oppressive laws and restrictions. They lose strength immensely by this false position. If it were true, then there would be a case in which slavery and ignorance nourished virtue, and so far we should have an argument for the continuance of bondage. But we want freedom and culture for woman, because subjection and ignorance have debased her, and with her, Man; for -

If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,How shall men grow?

Both Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft have too much sagacity to fall into this sentimental exaggeration. Their ardent hopes of what women may become do not prevent them from seeing and painting women as they are. On the relative moral excellence of men and women, Mary Wollstonecraft speaks with the most decision:

Women are supposed to possess more sensibility, and even humanity, than men, and their strong attachments and instantaneous emotions of compassion are given as proofs; but the clinging affection of ignorance has seldom anything noble in it, and may mostly be resolved into selfishness, as well as the affection of children and brutes. I have known many weak women whose sensibility was entirely engrossed by their husbands; and as for their humanity, it was very faint indeed, or rather it was only a transient emotion of compassion. Humanity does not consist ‘in a squeamish ear’, says an eminent orator. ‘It belongs to the mind as well as the nerves.’ But this kind of exclusive affection, though it degrades the individual, should not be brought forward as a proof of the inferiority of the sex,

Mary Wollstonecraft 7

because it is the natural consequence of confined views: for even women of superior sense, having their attention turned to little employments and private plans, rarely rise to heroism, unless when spurred on by love! and love, as an heroic passion, like genius, appears but once in an age. I therefore agree with the moralist who asserts ‘that women have seldom so much generosity as men’; and that their narrow affections, to which justice and humanity are often sacrificed, render the sex apparently inferior, especially, as they are commonly inspired by men; but I contend that the heart would expand as the understanding gained strength, if women were not depressed from their cradles.

We had marked several other passages of Margaret Fuller’s for extract, but as we do not aim at an exhaustive treatment of our subject, and are only touching a few of its points, we have, perhaps, already claimed as much of the reader’s attention as he will be willing to give to such desultory material.

(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and femalesexuality Brissenden, R. F. , Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel ofSensibility from Richardson to Sade(London, 1974). Barker-Benfield, G. J. , The Culture ofSensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Berger, P. L. & Luckman, T. , The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology ofKnowledge (1966) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). Butler ,)., Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (flew York: Routledge, 1993). Butler, M. (Ed.) Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1984). Cobban, A. (Ed.) The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789–1800, second edition (London: Adam &Charles Black, 1960. Foucault, M. , The History ofSexuality, 3 volumes (London: Lane, 1979). Harris, R. , The Language Myth (London: Duckworth, 1981). Kaplan, C. , Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986). Kelly, G. , Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career ofMary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan;New York: St Martin’s, 1992). Taylor, B. , Eve and the NewJerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London:Virago, 1983). Wardle, R. M. , Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951). Wollstonecraft, M. (1792) A Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman, edited by Carol Poston , second edition(New York: W. W. Norton 8c Co., 1988). Wollstonecraft, M. (1976) Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,edited by Carole H. Poston (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Wollstonecraft, M. (1979) The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Ralph M. Wardle(Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery Coupland, Sir Reginald . The British AntLSlavery Movement. London: Cass, 1933. Craton, Michael . Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery. Garden City, N.Y.:Anchor/Doubleday, 1974. Ferguson, Moira . First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578—17 99. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1985. Flexner, Eleanor. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography. New York: Coward, McCann &Geoghegan, 1972. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth . Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism. Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press, 1991. Freud, Anna . The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense: The Writings of Anna Freud. 2 vols. Translatedby Cecil Baines . Vol. 2. New York: International University Press, 1966. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2d ed.,rev. New York: Random House, 1963. Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550—1812. Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Klingberg, Frank Joseph . The AntFSlavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism.New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926. MacDowell, Douglas . Spartan Law. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986. Michell, H. Sparta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. Shimron, Benjamin . Late Sparta: The Spartan Revolution, 243–146 B.C. Are thusa Monographs III.Buffalo: Department of Classics, State University of New York, 1972. Smith, Samuel Stanhope . 2d ed. 1810. Reissued as An Essay on the Causes of the Variety ofComplexion and Figure in the Human Species, edited by Winthrop D. Jordan . Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1965. Sunstein, Emily. A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Tomalin, Claire . The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1974.

Wollstonecraft, Mary . The Female Reader…. London: Johnson, 1789. Zuill, William . Bermuda Sampler, 1815–1850…. Bermuda: 1937. Reprint, Suffolk, England: RichardClay, n.d.