Volume 19, Number 7 · November 2, 1972
The Strength of an Injured Spirit
By V.S. Pritchett
Mary Wollstonecraft
by Eleanor Flexner
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 307 pp., $8.95
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives
by Diane Johnson
Knopf, 232 pp., $7.95
Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft have usually dwelt, quite properly, on the historical influences that favored her leap from a statement of the rights of man to her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. Her new biographer looks rather to those things in her upbringing and private character that turned a neurasthenic into the pioneer of feminism. The driving force sprang, as in other outstanding founders, from a sense of personal injustice and family torment; her vision was intimately connected with the wrongs of childhood.
Review, 2881 words
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