Volume 23, Number 2 · February 19, 1976
Vindicating Mary Wollstonecraft
By Ellen Moers
Works Discussed in This Essay
Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life
by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited and introduced by Gina Luria
Garland Publishing, 160 pp., $22.00
Mary, a fiction
by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited and introduced by Gina Luria
Garland Publishing, 187 pp., $22.00
A vindication of the rights of woman: with strictures on political and moral subjects
by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited and introduced by Gina Luria, by Miriam Kramnick
Penguin, 319 pp., $3.50 (paper)
An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it has Produced in Europe
by Mary Wollstonecraft, with an introduction by Janet M. Todd
Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 538 pp., $35.00
Posthumous works, Vol. 1: The wrongs of woman, or Maria (1st eight chapters)
by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by William Godwin, edited and introduced by Gina Luria
Garland Publishing, 181 pp., $22.00
Posthumous works, Vol. 2: The wrongs of woman, or Maria (chapter 9 to end) and The first book of a series of lessons for children
by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by William Godwin, edited and introduced by Gina Luria
Garland Publishing, 196 pp., $22.00
Posthumous works, Vol. 3: Letters ["to Imlay"]
by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by William Godwin, edited and introduced by Gina Luria
Garland Publishing, 192 pp., $22.00
Posthumous works, Vol. 4: Miscellaneous pieces
by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by William Godwin, edited and introduced by Gina Luria
Garland Publishing, 195 pp., $22.00
Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft, with an introduction by Moira Ferguson
Norton, 154 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Memoirs of the author of a vindication of the rights of woman
by William Godwin, edited and introduced by Gina Luria
Garland Publishing, 199 pp., $22.00
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography
by Ralph M. Wardle
University of Nebraska Press, 366 pp., $3.75 (paper)
Godwin and Mary
edited by Ralph M. Wardle
University Press of Kansas, 125 pp., $4.00
Mary Wollstonecraft
by Eleanor Flexner
Penguin, 307 pp., $2.50 (paper)
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
by Claire Tomalin
New American Library/Mentor, 316 pp., $1.95 (paper)
A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
by Emily Sunstein
Harper and Row, 355 pp., $15.00
Aspects généraux du roman féminin en Angleterre de 1740 à 1800 nouvelle série #52, Editions Ophrys 1966
by Philippe Séjourné
Publication des Annales de la faculté des lettres Aix-en-Provence
La Destinée féminine dans le roman européean du dix-huitième siècle 1713-1807: Essai de gynécomythie romanesque
by Pierre Fauchery
Librairie Armand Colin, Paris
When the final word is said on Mary Wollstonecraft she will appear to us, I suspect, as one of the most powerful and distinctive prose writers in the language. The one work by which she is generally known today, her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, establishes Wollstonecraft as the greatest of polemical feminists. But she wrote a great deal more, and wider acquaintance with the complete oeuvre, now slowly coming back into print, may well inspire a reassessment of the history of English Romanticism to include the turn-of-the-century woman writer, who, like Wollstonecraft (and Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth, Burney), wrote prose fiction, treatises, letters, essays, and diaries, rather than poetry. 'I am compelled to think that there is some thing in my writings more valuable,' she wrote Godwin in 1796, 'than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm elogiums—I mean more mind—denominate it as you will—more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination—the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers.'
Review, 4787 words
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