IN LATE OCTOBER 1795, ONE of the most revolutionary authors of the last decade poised to throw herself from London’s Putney Bridge. Rationally, the author made this decision because she no longer believed in the superstitious tales of eternal punishment promised to those who “self-murder.” Irrationally, the author made this decision because she had been jilted by a lover. In a note calculated to haunt him, she wrote, “May you never know by experience what you have made me endure . . . in the midst of business and sensual pleasure, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.” That is a serious curse: Every time you make a business deal, I will be there silently watching. Every time you bed another woman, I will be there silently watching. Not so easy to get that pen of yours up now, is it? The writer of this odd suicide note was none other than Mary Wollstonecraft, the famous author of the protofeminist treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Even before the invention of the printing press, writers were wrestling with the question of professional authorship. Could writing be viewed as an actual career? Of course it can, says anyone who’s read Harry Potter. But making a living from writing is a fairly new phenomenon in the history of print. For the first three hundred fifty years, “professional author” was a made-up career, like philosopher, fantasy football manager, or American vice president.
Over the course of the 1700s, the trade in printed books expanded so dramatically that, for the first time, many authors could actually list “writing” as their primary occupation. The number of titles available in England jumped 50 percent, from 1750 to 1775, but leapt 170 percent from 1775 to 1800. Writers enjoyed more venues to publish reviews, essays, histories, and even those newfangled and morally bankrupt “novels” that everyone was warning about. Hit the Zeitgeist with a single work, and your name could be lauded all across Europe.
At this same time, a philosophical shift was creeping into the world of print. Authors were starting to be celebrated as heroes, special voices of authority sustained by virtue of their unique genius. They even began asserting, and winning, rights to previously nebulous concepts such as “intellectual property,” through landmark court cases such as Pope v. Curll (1741). This all sounds great, until you remember that this is the eighteenth century, a time before proper sewage systems, when bloodletting was still considered an important treatment for illness, and when married women were not considered fit to own property. Mary Wollstonecraft took on the challenge of becoming a literary authority despite the impropriety of possessing a vagina. As a result, Wollstonecraft’s reputation has varied so wildly over the past two hundred years that you’re just as likely to find statements calling her the “Mother of Feminism” as a “Prostitute.”
When Wollstonecraft decided to end her life in 1795, October on the River Thames would have been about the worst time to do it. Autumn was apparently the busiest season for desperate women throwing themselves into a watery grave. According to her biographer Janet Todd: “Unconscious, [Wollstonecraft] floated downstream, until pulled out of the river by fishermen, doubtless used to suicides . . . The Royale Humane Society had been set up to pursue the enlightened policy of thwarting self-murders by receiving, and if possible, resuscitating bodies found floating in the Thames.”
How would a lovesick suicide attempt affect the reputation of the fierce author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? Here’s one report from The Gentleman’s Magazine just after Wollstonecraft was pulled from the icy river. “From a mind of such boasted strength we naturally expect fortitude; but, in this instance, she was weak as the weakest girl” [emphasis original]. So, only authors with the weakest, girliest of minds commit suicide. Just ask Ernest Hemingway.
It wasn’t the suicide attempt(s) that would most damage Wollstonecraft’s hard-earned reputation, however. It was a memoir. Written by the man she married a year and a half after the fateful Putney jump. William Godwin intended to memorialize his well-known wife to the annals of literary glory, but, in the end, he served only to relegate her to the trash heap of history.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT was born in 1759 to an unfortunate London family. By her own accounts, her father was a lazy tyrant who spent more time abusing her mother than supporting her. Her mother rarely pushed back; Wollstonecraft remembered her mother as more a slave than a spouse.
Ducking the rage of her frequently drunken husband, Wollstonecraft’s mother took solace in her children—well, one of them, anyway, the eldest son, Ned. Generally neglected by both parents, Mary felt compelled to look elsewhere for acceptance. She found it in the London-based family of Matthew and Caroline Blood. Their daughter Frances (who went by Fanny, by the way. Fanny Blood. Aaaand moving on) would become one of Wollstonecraft’s closest friends and confidantes.
At twenty-four years old, Mary, two of her sisters, and Fanny opened schools for young women in Islington and Newington Green in an attempt to carve out financial independence. Schools at the time were about as stable as dot-com businesses after 2001. The start-up was cheap and the qualifications for employment low, but most ventures sagged under starving profits, and eventually went under. Within two and a half years, both Wollstonecraft’s schools had failed.
Ironically, while Wollstonecraft was failing at running her schools, she was succeeding in becoming an authority on them. In the same year that her Newington Green school closed, she began work on her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). She became a nationally recognized “pedagogue with her own theory of education.” As the old saying goes, those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; and those who can do neither, write a book about it . . .
Mary Wollstonecraft wasn’t destined to become the eighteenth-century Danielle Steel. She was more in the neighborhood of a poverty-stricken single mom who writes in cafés and makes ends meet by doing translation work. And yes, that’s an almost word-for-word description of J. K. Rowling, but Wollstonecraft didn’t have Harry Potter in her back pocket. She had the YA book Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. Wollstonecraft worked for years as a translator, journalist, and editor to financially support herself.
The career path before Wollstonecraft was not easy. The concept of the professional author, one who could live solely off his writing, would have seemed more myth than reality to people living in the first centuries of print. For women, the idea was even more far-fetched. While there are some rock star exceptions, such as the fourteenth-century Venetian Christine de Pizan (who was widowed at twenty-five and made a living for herself and her three children as a popular author), until the eighteenth-century the world of print was guarded in a kind of aristocratic system, which generally excluded both the uneducated (see: poor) and the mentally inferior (see: women).
Most readers today take for granted the concept of the author, but in the thousands of years that humanity has been writing, we’ve had a hard time figuring out just what an “author” is. Plato argued that most poets should be cast out of the city as useless liars. In the best cases, authors were seen as auctors, tasked with creatively standing in the place of God. To take sole credit for one’s work would have been akin to plagiarizing God. According to Dante, those guilty of fraudulent acts were sent to the eighth circle of hell, where they would be dipped in excrement for eternity.
Through most of the Middle Ages, writing wasn’t even considered a paying gig: how can you sell something that was a gift from God? You can’t. Just like you can’t sell that pair of scratchy socks your nana knitted last year, you cannot, if you’re the medieval writer Boethius, sell The Consolation of Philosophy. Both are gifts. Equal-magnitude gifts.
The concept of what an author did, what authority he had, and what he was owed for it, has never been consistent. The sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus was morally offended when someone suggested that his printer had paid him for his work. Even well into the 1700s, it’s easy to find documentation that shows an author was “still being represented as just one of the numerous craftsmen involved in the production of a book—not superior to, but on par with other craftsmen.” Yet, the blossoming of European capitalism rapidly expanded the market for books, which required more printers, more papermakers, more booksellers, more binders, and yes, even more writers.
With the trail blazed by the likes of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of a number of women who hoped she could earn economic independence on the same path. But because “authorship” overlaps “authority,” it rubbed some gentlemen the wrong way that a woman could dare to acquire some of the latter. It’s no coincidence that women writers have frequently been accused of plagiarism, from Anne Bradstreet in 1650 (“If what I do prove well, it won’t advance, / They’ll say it’s stoln, or else it was by chance”) to claims that Truman Capote was the actual writer of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. Nor is it surprising to see how many women writers, such as the Brontë sisters, used male pseudonyms when trying to establish themselves. For women, as one scholar put it, “authorship had to be denied so as to be attained.” The golden age of the author was just beginning, and writers were required to check their coats and their womenfolk at the door.
Let’s pretend for a moment that this period of print history is a recipe for a soufflé. We take 1700–1850 CE and whisk it up as hard as we can. Then we add three cups of money, seven tablespoons of Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), a dash of Samuel Richardson (Pamela), and, let’s say, one hatful of Henry Fielding (Tom Jones). We’re pretty sure that’s how you make soufflés. You bite into this fluffy marvel of literary history, only to notice that something besides a basic familiarity with French cuisine is missing. Where’s the Mary Brunton in this recipe? Where’s the Charlotte Smith? Or the Sarah Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Montagu? Ann Radcliffe? Eliza Haywood? Maybe you added a little Jane Austen, so congratulations for that, but this is the moment when you realize that the soufflé you’ve just made is totally imbalanced. You put in way too much sausage and only one egg. (Good luck eating your next soufflé.)
The systematic excising of the contributions of women in this era has its own name. It’s called the Great Forgetting. Mary Wollstonecraft’s name has been penciled in and scribbled out of our soufflé recipe for two hundred years. Historian Seán Burke makes the point that “it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the struggles of feminism have been primarily a struggle for authorship.” And you can bet this struggle is reflected in the world of rare book collecting. Many first editions by the female authors just listed can be purchased at a fraction of the price of those by their male counterparts—with the usual exception of Jane Austen, whose Pride and Prejudice can reach very high prices: seventy-five thousand dollars or more.
During the Romantic Age, readers were eager for more than just the products of the author’s pen (gross). They wanted to know about the author himself. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the greatest autobiographies ever written, was published at the end of the eighteenth century. So was the first “warts and all” biography: James Boswell’s delightfully unflinching narrative of Samuel Johnson (the lexicographer behind the greatest English dictionary). Soon biographies started cropping up as a mainstay of nineteenth-century literary life. One of the most famous of these was Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which praised Brontë’s “great genius” (while simultaneously suggesting that her “duties” as a Victorian woman suffered for that genius). The first authoritative biography of Charles Dickens was written during this period, by his close friend and literary agent John Forster. But before that was the sexually charged, tell-all memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft by her grief-stricken widower—the one that obliterated her reputation for more than a century.
While the biographical approach to literary criticism can provide illuminating context to an author’s work, it’s also a double-edged sword. When sordid details of Wollstonecraft’s personal life became public, critics finally found the weapon they needed to strip her of her authority.
Read Wollstonecraft’s epitaph, and note the emphasis:
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN
Author of A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman
Born 27th April 1759
Died 10th September 1797
The crowning achievement of Wollstonecraft’s literary career, commemorated in stone, was published in 1792, just five years before her untimely death. Vindication “proposed a model of what we would now call ‘egalitarian’ or ‘liberal’ feminism. Grounded in the affirmation of universal human rights endorsed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Locke, Wollstonecraft argued that females are in all the most important aspects the same as males, possessing the same souls, the same mental capacities, and thus the same human rights.”
That Wollstonecraft had to start with, Hey, everybody, men and women don’t actually have different souls, gives you an idea of what she was working with. Her treatise took a hard look at female education, arguing in particular that girls should be “educated in the same subjects and by [the] same method as boys.” Latin, for example, was considered a cornerstone of a schoolboy’s curriculum, whereas for girls, it made them “unmarriageable.” Because the only thing worse than a woman talking back to you is a woman talking back to you in Latin.
What might Mary Wollstonecraft consider an “improper education”? Probably something like “the education of the women should be always relative to the men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them . . . to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable: these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy.” Cooking? Check. Mending holes in pantaloons? Check. But Latin? Hold on there, young lady, how exactly does that benefit a man?
The public appeal to separate male and female educations was made by none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 treatise, Émile, or On Education. Rousseau was one of the most influential philosophers of the French Enlightenment, and Émile was, he claimed, the “best and most important of all my writings.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a giant futue te ipsum to Rousseau and the others who espoused his misogynistic views. In it she devotes a significant amount of time to dismantling Rousseau’s ideas: “the mother, who wishes to give true dignity of character to her daughter, must, regardless of the sneers of ignorance, proceed on a plan diametrically opposite to that which Rousseau has recommended.”
In addition to bettering female education, Vindication also advocated for joint possession of household resources, equal opportunity employment, women’s suffrage, and equal pay for equal labor. Most of the core principles that would resurface in the gender equality movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were established in print by Mary Wollstonecraft two hundred years before, earning her that nom de guerre “Mother of Feminism.” But, in 1798, her husband published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which punted said nom into relative obscurity for the next century.
BY WRITING Memoirs, Godwin was paying tribute to Wollstonecraft, who had just died from complications of childbirth after delivering her second daughter. (This daughter, also named Mary, ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814. She would write Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus four years later, aspects of which would falsely be credited to her more famous consort.) A radical himself and, at the time, an even more successful public intellectual, Godwin was deeply in love with his revolutionary wife. He respected her sharp intellect and writing skills. In the depths of his grief, he didn’t seem to comprehend how others might read her works and not also fall in love with her. A candid biography of his extraordinary wife should endear her even more to the public, right? It worked for the infamously irascible Samuel Johnson, so why not Wollstonecraft? Her successes and failures would be immortalized in print, and in the end, her contemporaries would judge her from the vantage point of God, with all the fairness, mercy, and understanding requisite of such an office. Mary made mistakes, sure, but who hasn’t? Unfortunately, for those who disagreed with Wollstonecraft’s liberal, revolutionary writings, Godwin’s Memoirs was a pile of fresh ammunition, just waiting to be loaded into the guns of their righteous indignation.
The woman that Godwin painted in Memoirs was an odd duck. From the start, she was a girl who, when beaten by her father, refused to submit. “The blows of her father . . . instead of humbling her, roused her indignation. Upon such occasions she . . . was apt to betray marks of contempt.” A young woman who will not yield to her father?
“Dolls and the other amusements usually appropriated to female children, she held in contempt; and felt a much greater propensity to join in the active and hardy sports of her brothers . . .” Uh oh. Nothing good can come of girls who act like boys.
At nineteen, Wollstonecraft struck out on her own to pursue a career separate from her family. She seemed relatively uninterested in marriage, and was constantly striving to be an independent breadwinner. Young ladies who constantly follow after such masculine pursuits might be prone to other masculine undertakings. Like having sex whenever you feel like it and giving little thought to the aftermath . . .
(Ah, we are reading ahead in Memoirs. The difference, we might suggest, is that men who gallivanted through the countryside, leaving title aftermaths in their wake, were not professionally discredited for a hundred years as a result.)
“Unsex’d female” was the term popularized in this period to attack women such as Mary Wollstonecraft. While at first that sounds like a woman who just needs more sex to solve her problems, it actually meant a female who did “mannish” things, such as, apparently, having a career. When A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792, at least one parent publicly denounced the treatise as infecting her daughters with this species of unsex’d mannishness:
“A ‘mother’ wrote to the Ladies [sic] Monthly Museum to lament that her four daughters had been corrupted by the book: one lost her ‘softness’ and indulged in horse-racing, fox-hunting and betting; a second had taken up Latin and Greek; a third was scientifically dissecting her pets; and a fourth was challenging men to duels.”
By the mid-nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s name was anathema. “It is to be lamented that Wollstonecraft, whom nature . . . meant should be a bright pattern of perfection to her sex, should, by her erroneous theories and false principles, have rendered herself instead, rather the beacon by which to warn the woman of similar endowments with herself, of the rocks upon which enthusiasm and imagination are too apt to wreck their possessor.”
And that isn’t even from some rabid Wollstonecraft critic. That was a selection from one of the earliest sympathetic discussions of her life, published in a Literary Ladies of England compilation from 1843, fifty years after her death.
For more than a century, and to some extent even today, Wollstonecraft couldn’t escape the damage of her husband’s ill-fated biography. Unlike a male author whose sexual dalliances could be revealed with his reputation relatively intact (Mr. Hemingway, again), Mary had no such luxury. A scarlet letter on her person equaled a scarlet letter on everything she had ever thought or written.
To understand the depth of her “immoral” actions, one needed only read Memoirs as far as the section on the Revolutionary War officer Gilbert Imlay. Captain Imlay was in his late thirties, tall, fit, and extremely handsome. These qualities could easily be assessed at a glance. But he was also a kind southern gentleman with considerable landholdings in his family state of Kentucky. Imlay’s Revolutionary War veteran status lent him glamour in the tumultuous Europe of the 1790s. He was an American adventurer, a man of refinement, and a successful entrepreneur. He was the eighteenth century’s Han Solo. How could you not fall for the guy? We’re falling for him and we’ve never seen him before. Wollstonecraft developed the same feelings after traveling to Paris in 1793. Unlike some of her previous infatuations, Imlay was single, open-minded, and passionately interested in her.
Captain Imlay was also a confident man. Like, a very con(fident) man. Despite his filling Mary’s head with visions of retiring to an idyllic farm in Kentucky, it’s unlikely Captain Imlay could ever have returned to the Bluegrass State. For one, Gilbert Imlay was born and bred in New Jersey. He served briefly in the War for Independence, receiving the rank of captain. From whence Kentucky, you might ask? After the war, Imlay used his veteran benefits to lay claim to lands in Kentucky that had been (cough) appropriated (cough, cough) from local Native American tribes. He became a deputy land surveyor and used his position to make shady business deals on the side. Whatever the extent of his scams, they backfired, and Imlay fled the American continent ahead of a barrage of lawsuits.
How much of this Wollstonecraft actually learned is open to speculation. She certainly knew that Imlay’s current profession was “French smuggler.” During the violent upheavals of the French Revolution, the British Navy blockaded the country. Imlay threw himself into overcoming that problem by running grain, iron, soap, and other supplies through the siege lines. Wollstonecraft euphemistically referred to that part of his business as “alum and soap.”
There’s a good chance that thirty-three-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft was a virgin when she met the charismatic, experienced Gilbert Imlay. Whatever the differences in their starting lines, once the pistol fired, Wollstonecraft did her best to catch up. This dawning sexuality would have been a conundrum for anyone familiar with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published just the year before. According to Vindication, ideal marriages were supposed to be nearly devoid of sex. In its place, Wollstonecraft argued for a relationship of mutual respect, in which “the heart, rather than the senses, is moved.” In Vindication, she approves of “affection,” but argues that “the personal intercourse of appetite . . . is despicable.”
During the more chaste periods of her life, Wollstonecraft looked at sexual passion as an elaborately decorated outhouse. Sure, what goes on behind that fancy door is necessary, but for God’s sake, let’s not dwell on it. Then she had sex and was like, Come again? (Sorry, that was too easy.)
“After years of preaching deferred gratification and rational living, sexless marriage and pure affection, Wollstonecraft had complemented the French Revolution with her own revolution: she had entered a sexual relationship outside marriage.” And she hadn’t just “entered a sexual relationship”; she’d cannonballed into the pool, utterly jettisoning the sexual ideals from Vindication. Now sex wasn’t a disease infecting a marriage of mutual affection. It was a basic human experience, “like hunger or thirst.” Exactly, say Second Wave feminists in the 1960s and ’70s. Gasp, say readers in 1798.
Wollstonecraft even went so far as to change the meaning of a fairly important word: “[She] now saw sexual desire as natural and right for women; indeed she went on to affirm that ‘chastity consisted in fidelity and that unchastity was an association with two people at the same time.’” That is a moral shift of tectonic proportions. Wollstonecraft was saying that premarital sex is totally fine and that things go morally askew only when you’re involved in more than one sexual relationship at a time. Wollstonecraft’s open-mindedness would have been out of place even two hundred years later, in a country that had undergone a sexual revolution, let alone in eighteenth-century Britain. For that reason, she stayed in France with Imlay, rather than returning home. France didn’t have time to hem and haw over whom Mary Wollstonecraft was sleeping with. It had its own guillotine-y problems.
There was another reason Wollstonecraft was reluctant to return to England. In May 1794, she gave birth to a girl named Fanny Imlay. Because Robespierre and the Terror were in full swing in Paris, and British citizens were being arrested and jailed, Wollstonecraft had taken Imlay’s last name as a form of protection. To her, this implied a marriage-level commitment. Imlay, however, saw things differently. Within weeks of Fanny’s birth, he departed revolutionary France for London. Wollstonecraft was left behind.
Thus begins one of the more tragic episodes that Memoirs lays out before the public in excruciating detail. “She had expected his return from week to week, and from month to month, but a succession of business still continued to detain him.” Time and again, Imlay promised to return to Wollstonecraft. Time and again, he did not. After a particularly harsh and dangerous winter in France alone with her child, Wollstonecraft returned to London in 1795, only to find that Imlay had moved on to other paramours.
Wollstonecraft left a note and drank poison (presumably laudanum). Whether before or just after she’d imbibed, Imlay intervened, and the suicide was averted. Five months later, she finally realized that any reconciliation with Imlay would be impossible, and she made the second attempt on her life by throwing herself from Putney Bridge into the River Thames.
Far from William Godwin’s original intentions when publishing Memoirs, the public’s reaction of moral horror to Wollstonecraft’s sexual promiscuity destroyed any chance of a fair reading. Godwin, himself a controversial and well-known philosopher, may have tried to turn things around at the end by describing his generally happy courtship and marriage to Wollstonecraft. But every ceremonial sword he unsheathed was double-edged. He let slip (or rather came right out and said) that he and Wollstonecraft shared a passionate premarital sexual relationship, that said relationship resulted in a child, and that he married her after the pregnancy so she wouldn’t be ashamed in front of London society. It didn’t take long for critics to pounce on these scandals.
While the shiny apple of economic independence hung before professional authors, women such as Wollstonecraft who managed to get their hands on such fruit found theirs laced with poison. Even the most celebrated female authors were respected according to their ability to “value female modesty and morality above literary ambition.” According to literary scholar Catherine Ingrassia, “The eighteenth century began its own process of writing a kind of women’s literary history. Publications [favored female] writers who exhibited propriety, modesty, and decorum.” On the flip side, if you’re a woman and you scorn society’s values, then your contributions are blasted to pieces through morally inflected attacks. Thus Wollstonecraft, author of one of the greatest works on women’s rights, is reduced to the following verse about the “dame the Rights of Women writ”:
Lucky the maid that on her volume pores,
A scripture, archly fram’d, for propagating w---s.
The periodical that published this verse disliked Wollstonecraft for her liberal politics, and it wasn’t above demonstrating its disdain by attacking her sexuality. In its debut issue, the word Prostitution was cross-referenced to “See Mary Wollstonecraft.” Once the famous female rationalist, now she was reduced to nothing but a sexual punch line.
The extreme humanizing of the Mother of Feminism was just too much for, well, everyone, for the next hundred years. Never mind that Vindication laid the groundwork for women’s rights all over the Western world. Wollstonecraft had not one, but two premarital sexual partners and periodically suffered from depression. In an era when female authors were often written off as emotional “scribblers,” the passions of Mary Wollstonecraft were just too easy a target.
Wollstonecraft was not just forgotten. She became persona non grata. If people spoke of her at all, it was as a cautionary tale. Considering her traumatic death, that tale would probably have been a German fairy tale, and all the children of Europe would have wept and promised never to give women equal rights because look how it turned out for Mary “the Bridge Jumper” Wollstonecraft.
Mary Hays, another British feminist and an acquaintance of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, left Wollstonecraft’s name out of a six-volume history of more than three hundred famous women published in 1803. As one scholar points out, “Hays’s actions here remind us of just how dangerous it had become by 1800 for a woman who hoped to be published and taken seriously to identify openly with Wollstonecraft as a person.” Because a woman’s standing could not survive a scandal of the magnitude of Godwin’s Memoirs, other women’s rights advocates, “who did not wish to be tarred and feathered with the blackened brush of Wollstonecraft’s reputation,” felt they had no choice but to excise Wollstonecraft from their cause.
In this climate, Wollstonecraft’s due as an author was initially revived not through her own works, but through later biographies. Ironically enough, her rehabilitation started with someone who initially intended to write a biography of Godwin. Charles Kegan Paul’s 1876 biography of William Godwin focused on many overlooked details of Wollstonecraft’s life, but whitewashed much of her sexual history. These well-intentioned lies achieved what Godwin’s well-intentioned truths could not.
New editions of Vindication began to appear from the 1890s onward. With each new edition, commentators have continually resurrected and reinvented Wollstonecraft to suit the needs of their generation. Even our current scorn for Wollstonecraft’s sexist treatment is more a reflection of our society than hers. Her reputation will continue to change as long as our society and our concept of authorship do the same—which is to say, forever.
Long before the invention of the Western printing press, the definition of “author” had been in flux. Maybe the author was a prophet, standing in the place of the gods. Or perhaps he was simply an entertainer, imitating for a living. An author might be a vessel, merely recording the inspiration of God as it flowed through him. Or he might be a professional writer, selling the products of his mind for cash. Near the time of Wollstonecraft’s death, the author became an individual genius, standing far above his fellow human beings.
Mary Wollstonecraft did her best to change all the hes in that last paragraph to shes. As one scholar aptly puts it, “For women who had no rights, no individual existence or identity, the very act of writing—particularly for a public audience—was in essence an assertion of individuality and autonomy, and often an act of defiance. To write was to be; it was to create and to exist.”
At a time when the world recoiled at the complicated emotions of human relationships, women such as Mary Wollstonecraft lost their words, their identity, and even their historical existence. Because the words author and authority have always had a tenuous relationship, it would take another century to begin to restore Wollstonecraft’s feminist nom de guerre.
Wollstonecraft’s writings mean something different to each person and each generation. This means that in many ways the story of Mary Wollstonecraft is really the story of ourselves. Charlotte Whitton, the first female mayor of a major Canadian city, once remarked with characteristic acerbity that, “Whatever women do[,] they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.” In 1798, however, Godwin’s biographical gamble turned out to be a poor one indeed. Whatever else he may have predicted about his wife’s reputation when he published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he didn’t understand that a prophet cannot pursue gratification. A vessel cannot be flawed. A professional cannot be desperate. And a genius cannot be weak.
Well . . . if you’re a woman, anyway.