Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight due to complications from childbirth, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts.ĭuring her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement they had one daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Among the general public and specifically among feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has received much more attention than her writing because of her unconventional, and often tumultuous, personal relationships.

The Independent includes Wollstonecraft in its series on the world’s greatest philosophers.Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. The seven-volume The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (Pickering, 1989), is the first edition containing all the known published writings. Revised editions of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men and other collected works of Wollstonecraft are completed by Wollstonecraft scholars and published in single volumes. In 1974 Claire Tomalin publishes a substantial new biography The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974) and wins the Whitbread First Book Prize. Vindication is republished, edited by Eleanor Louise Nicholes (Scholar’s, 1960) and Miriam Brody Kramnick for Pelican Classics (Penguin, 1972) and thereafter repeatedly republished under that series. Wollstonecraft’s work and intellectual contributions are reclaimed by historians during the second-wave feminist movement. Vindication is published within Everyman Classics making copies more readily available.

The Times articulates the establishment view that the interest of her work is “mainly historical”. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is republished with an introduction by Fawcett (1891).

Vindication: the rise of Wollstonecraft’s reputationĭetails of Wollstonecraft’s unorthodox personal life that emerge after her death in 1797 overshadow her literary output during the Victorian period.Īs women campaign for the vote, suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett argues for a reappraisal of Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft by Mary Wollstonecraft