WOLLSTONECRAFT, MARY

WOLLSTONECRAFT, MARY (1759–1797), radical thinker, polemicist, translator, and writer of fiction and educational and historical works.

Mary Wollstonecraft was the eldest of three daughters and the second of six children born to Edward John Wollstonecraft, a silk weaver of Spitalfields, London, and Elizabeth Dixon, from Ballyshannon, Ireland. Her father's subsequent failure as a gentleman farmer had the consequence that she spent her adult life constantly seeking independence by earning enough to support herself, her sisters, and later, her child. Her early educational works, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786), Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and the anthology The Female Reader (1788) are fruits of her experiences as lady's companion, mistress of a school set up

with her sisters Eliza and Everina, and as governess to the Kingsboroug family at Mitchelstown near Corke in Ireland; while her first novel Mary, a Fiction (1787) is based on an intense friendship with Fanny Blood. Her London publisher Joseph Johnson also employed her to review and abstract for his Analytical Review, founded in 1788, and to translate contemporary works.

Wollstonecraft's two best known works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), published anonymously in reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), published under her own name, owe their genesis to a London group of Dissenter friends in Newington Green, including Dr. Richard Price (1723–1791), whom Wollstonecraft met when running the school in the area, and to Joseph Johnson's circle—including the artist Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) and the radical thinker Thomas Paine (1737–1809). In these two works, stimulated by discussions on the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft argued for enfranchising those who had no political rights because franchise was then based on ownership of property. She advocated representation and citizenship for both men and women, including the right to useful employment for both sexes.

In 1792, Wollstonecraft went to France to report on the French Revolution for Johnson, which enabled her to recover from an unhappy love for Fuseli. Her observations became An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794). In 1793, the year of the execution of the king of France, Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792), she began a relationship with Gilbert Imlay (c. 1754–1828), an American writer and trader, who, on the passing of the Law of Suspects (17 September 1793), registered her as his wife at the American Embassy. Wollstonecraft bore his child, Fanny, named after her friend who died in Portugal in 1785. After attempting suicide in 1795, she agreed to act as Imlay's business associate in an attempt to gain redress for the loss of a cargo of silver reputedly lost in Scandinavia. Her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden (1796) was the literary spin-off from intricate and difficult negotiations on Imlay's behalf while traveling in Scandinavia with her baby daughter and maid. On her return to London, her reaction to Imlay's repeated unfaithfulness was a second suicide attempt. Miraculously saved from drowning in the River Thames in October 1795, she lived to marry the philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836) in 1797. Wollstonecraft wrote the never-finished "Lessons" for her daughter Fanny and worked on a further development of her feminist ideas in the novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (published posthumously in 1798), in which she presented an acute analysis of the intricate interrelation of class, gender, and love. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever on 10 September 1797, eleven days after the birth of her second daughter, Mary, the future Mary Shelley (1797–1851).

The publication by Godwin of Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (1798) continued the trend of turning Wollstonecraft the celebrity into an object of censure on account of her unconventional personal life, by revealing details of her sexual history. Less than a century later, however, the suffragist movement found in Wollstonecraft a champion for their cause. As antidote to the appropriation of Wollstonecraft by a variety of feminist persuasions, scholarship of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has tended to concentrate on two areas: situating Wollstonecraft within the intellectual and social parameters of the late eighteenth century and making known further details of her eventful life. Mary Poovey (1984) discusses Wollstonecraft in relation to concepts of appropriate behavior of her time, and Barbara Taylor (2003) stresses the theistic framework of her thought. Lyndall Gordon's research on Mary Wollstonecraft's travels in Scandinavia (2005) reveals hitherto unknown details of that hazardous and demanding journey.

See alsoBurke, Edmund; Feminism; French Revolution; Godwin, William; Shelley, Mary.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Todd, Janet, and Marilyn Butler, eds. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. 7 volumes. London, 1989.

Secondary Sources

Gordon, Lyndall. Mary Wollstonecraft: A New Genus. London, 2005.

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago, 1984.

Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge, U.K., 2003.

Jennifer Lorch