Volume 52, Number 19 · December 1, 2005
The First Feminist
By Fiona MacCarthy
Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
by Lyndall Gordon
HarperCollins, 562 pp., $29.95
Lyndall Gordon's new book opens with a wonderful first paragraph describing Mary Wollstonecraft's crossing of the Channel from England to Revolutionary France. In December 1792 Wollstonecraft was thirty-three. She was traveling alone and, characteristically contrary, she was making a journey in the opposite direction to most of her fellow countrymen and -women, who, alarmed by signs of the erupting Terror, were deserting France and heading homeward fast. Wollstonecraft arrived in Paris just as William Wordsworth left the city he now saw as 'a wood where tigers roam.'
Review, 3930 words
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