Wollstonecraft, Mary
1759–1797

Mary Wollstonecraft, who was born in London on April 27, 1759, is famous as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argued that women are "rendered weak and wretched" by "a false system of education" and "mistaken notions of female excellence" pervasive in society. Her strong polemic against gender inequality is no longer easy reading, but the author herself continues to stir the imagination. Violently opposed to "the preposterous distinction of rank," Wollstonecraft was a person of unwavering moral seriousness and commitment. A child of the Enlightenment, she was also a Romantic, and believed that all women "who have acted like rational creatures, or shewn any vigour of intellect, have accidentally been allowed to run wild." She was influenced by the ideas that informed the French Revolution, especially those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom she argues in the Vindication. After her death—she died in London on September 10, 1797, of puerperal fever, a consequence of her biological life as a woman and of bad (male) doctoring—Wollstonecraft was vilified by enemies as an "unsex'd female," and eulogized by friends for her "ardent, ingenuous, and unconquerable spirit." She has figured ever since then in discussions of sex and gender, most often as a figure—a woman who experimented sexually, a rejected lover, and an unmarried mother who died after giving birth to the child who would become the author of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

INFLUENCES AND SHAPING EXPERIENCES

The life and character of Wollstonecraft have been the subject of many biographies, most recently three (Flexner 1972, Tomalin 1974, Sunstein 1975) written at the crest of the second wave of feminism, and two more big books (Todd 2000, Gordon 2005) published in the early twenty-first century. Raised on the edges of gentility by quarreling parents, Wollstonecraft had painful early experience of inequality and poverty, envy and injustice. Her complex and conflicted work experiences—caring for her mother, sisters, and friends, and working in traditional ladies' occupations as a teacher, companion, and governess, and later, less conventionally, as a journalist—shaped her scorn for conventional gender roles. Her intellectual development was also affected by the influence of the Dissenters, Nonconformists, and radical thinkers she met, and of course by reading the works of those, such as Edmund Burke, with whom she disagreed. It was strongly colored by her tumultuous responses to the women and men, older and younger than she, with whom she became emotionally entangled.

Her idealism and her sense of being different sometimes seem to have been intrinsic to her person, her woman's body and face. "O why was I born with a different Face," cries "Mary" in a poem by William Blake, who knew Wollstonecraft and deplored the envy she aroused in those who saw her as different. Conventional assumptions about gender roles were important in shaping Wollstonecraft's sense of her relations to others, and therefore of herself. At fourteen, defending her "romantic notions of friendship" in a letter to another girl, she wrote, "I have a heart that scorns disguise, and a countenance which will not dissemble." The American anthropologist Ruth Benedict recalled being inspired by the portrait of Wollstonecraft in the National Gallery in London, the image of a woman who "had saved her soul alive." Her life and work seem to illustrate the fact that soul and body and mind are mutually constitutive.

SIGNIFICANT WORKS

A self-portrait of the passionate writer and teacher is implicit in Wollstonecraft's combative famous (second) Vindication, as it is in her other books. In addition to private letters, these include two short works about and for children written in the 1780s, a tract and a fiction; the Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790); prose describing her experiences in France and later in Scandinavia; and two novels. The latter are remarkable for their critique of the conventional woman's novel. Mary: A Fiction (1788) con-fronts head-on with its title the challenge of a woman writing, and a reader interpreting, a fictional story as her own. The author's preface announces her intention "to develop a character different from those generally portrayed," and to exhibit "the soul of the author" and "the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers." But "I cannot live without loving—and love leads to madness," Mary exclaims. In The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), Wollstonecraft focuses from another angle on the issue of autobiographical fiction by giving her tale the title of a polemic. Maria is the victim of a cruel husband and ends up in prison. There, for the instruction of her daughter, she writes down her own story, and the even more appalling story of Jemima, a poor woman and fellow prisoner. The alternative endings of the story that Wollstonecraft left were assembled and published after she died by her widower, the radical thinker and novelist William Godwin, who loved Wollstonecraft and married her, although it was against his principles, after she became pregnant.

It was as a business agent for an earlier lover, the American Gilbert Imlay, whom she had met and lived with in Paris, that Wollstonecraft traveled with only her infant daughter, Fanny, and Marguerite, her maid, to Scandinavia. It is unclear whether Imlay sent her away or she went with the aim of getting him back. Her letters to him, edited in the service of discretion, were published, in 1796, as Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It is a reticent yet personal and poetic travel book. "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book," Godwin wrote about it. Wollstonecraft describes the scenery and salty meals of Scandinavia, and experiences such as being rocked to sleep on a bed of sails at the bottom of a boat, then being awakened to her solitude by "a discourteous wave." Her energy, curiosity, and lively imagination, her sensitivity and responsiveness, her respect for plain people and her nostalgic longing for love, are all there; for the reader of the early twenty-first century, her literary gifts are most apparent in this book. It remains preoccupied with the different lots of the sexes. "Still harping on the same subject, you will exclaim—," she catches herself, self-reflexively. "How can I avoid it, when most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel" (Letter 19). The relations between feeling and reasoning, self and society, and sex and gender preoccupied Wollstonecraft: Her work and her story illuminate the connections among them.

see also Canon, Revising the; Literature: I. Overview.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benedict, Ruth. 1959. "Mary Wollstonecraft." In An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict, ed. Margaret Mead. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Flexner, Eleanor. 1972. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan.

Gordon, Lyndall. 2005. Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: HarperCollins.

Holmes, Richard. 1985. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

St. Clair, William. 1989. The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. London: Faber and Faber.

Sunstein, Emily W. 1975. A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harper and Row.

Todd, Janet. 2000. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tomalin, Claire. 1974. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1989. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. Washington Square: New York University Press.

Wollstonecraft, Mary, and William Godwin. 1987. A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of "The Rights of Woman," ed. Richard Holmes. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

                                 Rachel M. Brownstein