In recent years, Mary Wollstonecraft has been exceedingly well served by scholars working in the fields of literature, history, feminist and gender studies, and political philosophy. It has been a privilege to collaborate with many of the leading figures in Wollstonecraft studies and in the history of her period. My deepest thanks go to the colleagues who joined me in this volume, for their splendid essays as well as for their patience with my editorial nagging; and to the anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press, whose advice and encouragement were decisive when this project was in its earliest stages. I am particularly grateful to Linda Bree’s expert judgment not only as an editor but also as scholar of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature.
It is impossible to think about Mary Wollstonecraft without being haunted by the untimeliness of her death. This volume is perhaps doubly haunted, for in the course of its production, one of its contributors, Mitzi Myers, died suddenly. Myers’s work on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers has been wide-ranging and illuminating, and her many publications on Wollstonecraft have been particularly influential. Critics and scholars of the period will feel her loss keenly. This volume is dedicated to her.