Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (circa 1797) by John Opie.

Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759 – September 10, 1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and early feminist. She wrote several novels, essays, and children's books, but is best known for her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a criticism of Edmund Burke's pamphlet on the French Revolution, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), regarded as her most important work.

In the latter, Wollstonecraft argued that what appeared to be the nature of women was actually a consequence of the education, or lack of it, imposed on them by men, and that marriage was legalized prostitution. She argued in favor of a social order based on reason and free of superstition and prejudice.

Wollstonecraft was married to the philosopher William Godwin, a prominent atheist and one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement, and was the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. She died of puerperal fever shortly after the birth of her daughter.

Biography

Mary Wollstonecraft was the second child of seven, and the eldest daughter of Edward and Elizabeth Wollstonecraft. Mary's parents shared a preference for her older brother, which contributed to her loss of economic and class status as a young woman. Her grandfather was a wealthy silk merchant who left 10,000 pounds to her father, but Mary's father tried to distance himself from the trade and set up as a gentleman farmer first in Essex, and then near Beverley in Yorkshire.

In less than four years, Edward's farm in Essex failed. The failure drove Edward's career across England and Wales, to poorer and more remote farms, eventually squandering his inheritance. He developed a drinking problem and began to verbally, and perhaps even physically, abuse Mary's mother; Mary tried to shield her mother from Edward's aggression by sleeping nights on the landing near her mother's bedroom door. As a result of the neglect to which her parents subjected her, Mary assumed a mother's role towards her siblings, especially her two sisters Eliza and Everina.

In 1768, the Wollstonecrafts moved to a farm outside of Beverley, where Mary attended a local day-school for girls; the school attended to housewifery and morals, and the curriculum aimed at making a girl marriageable and ladylike — rudimentary French language, needlework, music, dancing, writing, and possibly some botany and accounts. At home or with friends she read general books, magazines and newspapers, and learned to consider social issues troubling Great Britain in general and Beverley in particular.

The Wollstonecrafts left Beverley for Hoxton, London, when Mary was fifteen. Here Mary became an autodidact, who learned through reading and by participating in the public sphere; the city and provinces held informal and formal discussion groups, public lectures, and clubs; libraries made books affordable; and coffee shops offered the latest periodicals and newspapers. When in Beverley, she attended the lectures of John Arden on experimental science; he also taught her, along with his daughter Jane Arden, how to argue philosophical problems.

In Hoxton, Mary also found mentors in her next-door neighbors, the Reverend Mr. Clare and his wife, who recommended and encouraged her to read proper books. It is through Mrs. Clare that Mary met Fanny Blood, a woman two years her senior, who became the emotional centre of Wollstonecraft's life for the following ten years. Fanny was a role-model to Mary, who inspired her to think of leaving her unhappy family life and of obtaining employment. Mary was prepared to leave, but was begged to stay by her mother; in exchange for staying, she was given a place to live near Fanny, lodging with an unusual couple: Thomas Taylor "the Platonist" and his wife. Mary became friends with them and began to read Plato, which helped to influence her ardent religiosity.

In what was perhaps one of the most formative experiences of Mary's early life, she convinced her younger sister, Elizabeth Wollstonecraft Bishop, to leave her husband and newborn baby after what was probably a case of post-partum depression but which Wollstonecraft and, presumably, Eliza viewed as an unhappy marriage. In a dramatic escape (during the eighteenth century wives and children literally belonged to the male head of the household), Eliza fled her home, leaving her baby behind. For the rest of her life, she had to eke out a living as a teacher and governess.

Mary eventually moved in with Fanny and her family after her mother's death in 1782, prompting Mary to throw all her energy into supporting the Bloods, as well as her own younger sisters. Early in 1784, Wollstonecraft, her two sisters, and Fanny Blood set up a school on Newington Green, a village just north of London. The following year, Fanny Blood left the school and sailed to Lisbon to marry. Later, Mary followed her friend to assist her in childbirth, but Fanny tragically died.

In 1786, Mary closed her school because of financial problems that had mounted during her absence. She tried another alternative available to young respectable women in need of money during this time - she became a governess to three of Lady Kingsborough's daughters in Ireland. Unfortunately, this lasted only a year as she and Lady Kingsbourough's relationship soured. Then, in a dramatic step, Mary moved to London and decided to become "the first of a new genus" - a female intellectual. To raise money and improve her spirits, Mary began to write Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; the work was published in 1787 by Joseph Johnson, and earned her ten guineas, which she gave to the Blood family. She also published Mary, A Fiction, a work that she had been composing while a governess for the Kings, and worked as a reader and translator for Joseph Johnson, beginning her career as a published writer.

In 1788, Joseph Johnson also published Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life and Of the Importance of Religious Opinions, and she began to work as a reviewer for the Analytical Review, a monthly periodical started by Joseph Johnson and Thomas Christie.

In 1790, Mary published Young Grandison, a translation of Maria van de Werken de Cambon's adaptation of the novel by Samuel Richardson, followed by a translation of Elements of Morality by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann. In November of that year, she anonymously published A Vindication of the Rights of Men; then, one month later, she published the second edition bearing her name, establishing her reputation as a partisan of reform. One year later, in 1791, she published a second edition of Original Stories, and started to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; she also met her future husband, the philosopher William Godwin, through Joseph Johnson in November of that year, although they were not mutually attracted at the time.

Godwin and Wollstonecraft's daughter, later known as Mary Shelley, was born in August; Wollstonecraft died in September of puerperal fever and septicemia, the result of the placenta remaining in her for several days and becoming gangrenous. She was buried at Old Saint Pancras Churchyard and there is a memorial to her there, though both her and Godwin's remains were later moved to Bournemouth where Mary Shelley is interred. In 1798, Godwin published Wollstonecraft's Posthumous Works which includes various essays, letters, and fragments of unfinished writing; it also includes Godwin's own Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary's first biography. Arguably Mary Wollstonecraft's greatest posthumous work was her daughter, known to history as Mary Shelley. Her husband brought up the younger Mary in a loving but rigorously rational manner, from which she rebelled by eloping with Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, before going on to write Frankenstein.

Works

• Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
• Mary: A fiction (1788)
• Original Stories from Real Life (1788)
• Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788)
• The Female Reader (1789)
• Young Grandison (1790)
• Elements of Morality (1790)
• A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
• An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794)
• Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796)

Posthumous Works

• The Cave of Fancy (1798)
• Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798)
• Letters to Imlay (1798)
• Letters on the Management of Infants (1798)
• Lessons (1798)
• On Poetry and our Relish for the Beauties of Nature (1798)

Further reading

• Falco, Maria J. ed. Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft. University Park: Penn State Press, 1996.
• Gordon, Lyndall. Mary Wollstonecraft. Little Brown, 2005.
• Gubar, Susan. Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
• Jump, Harriet. Mary Wollstonecraft: Writer. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
• Kelly, Gary. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: St. Martin's, 1992.
• Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
• Macdonald, D.L. and Kathleen Scherf ed. The Vindications: The Rights of Men and The Rights of Woman, By Mary Wollstonecraft. Broadview Press, 1997.
• Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler. The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. 7 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1989.
• Todd, Janet. The Complete Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
• Todd, Janet. The Political Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
• Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: Mary, A Fiction. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.
• Todd, Janet. A Wollstonecraft Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
• Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975.
• Tomalin, Claire. The Life and Death of May Wollstonecraft. Penguin, 1992.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie Fink, Barbara Johnson, John McGowan, and Jeffery J. Williams. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 582-593.

External links

• Short biography, picture, and 'Vindication' ebook at Bartleby.com
• Works by Mary Wollstonecraft. Project Gutenberg
• Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by William Godwin, at Project Gutenberg
• A short biography at The History Guide
• Free digitally-voiced audiobook of Mary: A Fiction at Babblebooks.com

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