"Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century. She talked and thought on paper: her letters were a large part of the drama of her life. In them we see her grow from an awkward child of fourteen into the pioneering feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and finally into the woman of thirty-eight facing death in childbirth." "This edition contains the complete correspondence of Mary Wollstonecraft, including a recently discovered interchange with the historian Catherine Macaulary and the only known fragments of letters to the Swiss artist Fuseli, with whom Wollstonecraft had a passionate friendship."--BOOK JACKET.
First published in 1976, this was the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works and most of the critical and biographical comments on her in English written between 1788 and 1975. It is designed both as a research tool for scholars and students and as a revelation of the quantity and variety of comment. The book is divided into three main chronological time periods of publication date and suggests the vagaries of Wollstonecraft’s posthumous reputation and indicates the peaks and troughs of interest. Known as an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights, Mary Wollstonecraft has received much critical attention with particular interest in her unorthodox lifestyle of the time and is now regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers.
Like every word she wrote, Wollstonecraft's letters are full of personal revelations and wise thoughts. They are doubly interesting because can trace the intimate thought which lay beneath the public statement. One could pick out of this book enough epigrams to make a motto calendar. "Men with common minds seldom break through general rules. Prudence is ever the resort of weakness." "There is always a mixture of sentiment and imagination in voluptuousness " might have been written as a partial apology for the wayward Imlay. She relates her interview with the Prime Minister of Denmark, and sums him up as being "more anxious not to do wrong than to do good."
The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin mirror the relationship of a remarkable literary couple. The correspondence collected here covers the period from July 13, 1796, to August 30, 1797, when "their friendship turned to romance, their romance to passion, their passion to consummation, their affair to a highly unconventional marriage during which they lived far enough apart to permit the continuing exchange of letters. Wardle, a superb editor, provides just enough annotation to allow the relationship to unfold by itself through the correspondence of these two doctrinaire rationalists, who both came late to love. . . . [Godwin & Mary] is the easiest, certainly the most delightful introduction to the life and prose of Mary Wollstonecraft."--Ellen Moers, New York Review of Books :Taken together, these letters help us to trace out the personal and domestic relations of Mary and Godwin at first hand, and they also throw a good deal of light on the contrasting characters of the pair. Professor Wardle's annotations are most helpful; always brief and concise, but never superfluous."--English Studies Ralph M. Wardle is the author of Oliver Goldsmith (1957), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (1951) and Halzlitt (1971).
Pioneering eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft lived a life as radical as her vision of a fairer world. She overcame great disadvantages - poverty (her abusive, sybaritic father squandered the family fortune), a frivolous education, and the stigma of being unmarried in a man's world. Her life changed when Thomas Paine's publisher, Joseph Johnson, determined to make her a writer. Wollstonecraft lived as fully as a man would, socializing with the great painters, poets, and revolutionaries of her era. She traveled to Paris during the French Revolution; fell in love with Gilbert Imlay, a fickle American; and, unmarried, openly bore their daughter, Fanny. This biography of Mary Wollstonecraft gives a balanced view. Diane Jacobs also continues Wollstonecraft's story by concluding with those of her daughters.