Even though Mary Wollstonecraft had little to no presence in history or literature curricula as recently as a generation ago, she has never exactly been a minor figure. Some, certainly, have wished her so. A dauntless advocate of political reform, Wollstonecraft was one of the first to vindicate the “rights of man,” but in her own – brief – lifetime and ever since, she achieved notoriety principally for her championship of women’s rights. And while some of this notoriety took the particular form of scandal of the sort that often attends women directly involved in public affairs, some of it she directly sought in her writing and in her conduct. Controversy always inspired Wollstonecraft, always sharpened her sense of purpose. Whether writing about education, history, fiction, or politics itself, she was always arguing – even her travelogue, written as a series of letters to her faithless lover, is an ongoing argument. And in turn, Wollstonecraft always inspired controversy. A revolutionary figure in a revolutionary time, she took up and lived out not only the liberal call for women’s educational and moral equality, but also virtually all of the other related, violently contested questions of the 1790s – questions pertaining to the principles of political authority, tyranny, liberty, class, sex, marriage, childrearing, property, prejudice, reason, sentimentality, promises, suicide, to mention only a few. Clearly, she struck many a raw nerve. Although her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), for example, at first received fairly respectful reviews as a tract on female education,1 after England and France declared war, it was increasingly (and correctly) read against the backdrop of its broader progressive agendas on behalf of liberty. Thereafter, efforts to vilify Wollstonecraft, though sometimes marked by an air of puerile jocularity, were hysterically intense. Horace Walpole famously called the champion of women’s rights a hyena in petticoats; Richard Polwhele arraigned her as the foremost among modern-day unsexed females; and the Anti-Jacobin Review of 1798 went so far as to index her under “P” for Prostitute, presumably because no woman could conceivably wish to criticize standards and practices of female modesty unless she wanted to breach them with impunity.2 No one could possibly arouse this sort of animus unless she is perceived to have posed an urgent, an important threat indeed. Vindications of this great vindicator are marked by a comparable intensity. When Blake invokes a “Mary” persecuted by “foul Fiends,” or later in the nineteenth century when Elizabeth Robins Pennell likens her to Saint Vincent de Paul and to Joan of Arc, it is clear that Wollstonecraft was regarded as a formidable figure who challenged the sexual and moral norms of her society in radical ways and who was martyred as a result.3
But assailed, revered, or lamented – anything but actually forgotten, even when her memory seemed to go underground – Wollstonecraft’s celebrity rested principally on the narrative that makes up her life, particularly as it was first related in Godwin’s Memoirs of in 1798. As Cora Kaplan observes here in her compelling essay on Wollstonecraft’s legacies, Ralph Wardle concludes his path-breaking 1951 biography by fully acceding to the assumption that it has not been her writing but rather her “personality” that “has kept her memory alive,” opining that for every “one” person who plodded her or his way through A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “dozens” thrilled to the story of her courage and idealism.4 There is no denying that ever since her death in 1797, Wollstonecraft endured as a story whose outlines are both highly charged and highly conventional – a story about a passionate but difficult woman’s idealism in love (her daring affair with Gilbert Imlay) as well as in politics (her hope for the French Revolution); about her struggles with crushing disappointment in both (Imlay abandoned her and their infant daughter; the French Revolution degenerated into the Terror); about her daring efforts to be independent and original in a world that demonized feminine independence and would not tolerate deviations from the commonplace; about her discovery of “true” love and happiness with William Godwin later in life, only to be cut short by her death in childbirth, of all deaths the one that confirms (as detractors observed) the “wrongs” to women she attempted to ameliorate. Only in the late 1960s and 1970s, when feminist studies began to make an impact on literary and historical studies in the academy, and when the Rights of Woman was issued in several paperbound editions – in the twentieth century, it had previously been available only in a 1929 Everyman Classic version alongside John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women – did attention begin to turn from Wollstonecraft’s life to Wollstonecraft’s works. Today, at the outset of the twenty-first century, as “feminism” is now acknowledged only to be part of Wollstonecraft’s project, The Rights of Woman itself, though surely still her popular work, is read with Mary, The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria, and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, all readily available in paperbound editions. And with the complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft issued for the first time, we can now say, contra Wardle, that “dozens” of readers are familiar with Wollstonecraft as a writer for every “one” who has ever read Godwin’s first biography of her, Memoirs of the Author of The Rights of Woman (1798), or pondered her remarkable afterlife as a personal story.
While committed to investigating Wollstonecraft’s crucial and distinctive stature as a figure, the present volume of essays is also inspired by this relatively newfound sense of Wollstonecraft’s breadth as a writer. Wollstonecraft is well suited for a volume in the Cambridge Companion series because her career encompasses writing of so many different kinds. As the late Carol Kay has observed, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft writes as a “philosopher” and a “moralist,” as an authority on the education of women, a book reviewer, a non-sexual voice of intuitive reason and ecstatic religious contemplation, and as political projector whose ideas should change the French Constitution and the entire course of the French Revolution. This multiplicity of rhetorical voices has at times been read as Wollstonecraft’s personal failure of intellectual control or as her noble effort to sustain a female critique of male discursive forms, when in fact, in Kay’s words, the “miscellaneous” forms Wollstonecraft employed are “symptoms of the diversity of literature and philosophy of [her] time.” The novels, essays, sermons, or pamphlets of writers demonstrably important to Wollstonecraft – take, for example, Rousseau, Burke, Richard Price, or Samuel Johnson – display similar traits of miscellaneousness and a similar decision to eschew being methodical in favor of being accessible to wide ranges of topics and sudden fluctuations of tone and mood.5 In Wollstonecraft’s case, such diversity has proved quite confounding, for working across the tidy disciplinary boundaries we have since constructed to organize disciplines within the academy as well as within the literary marketplace itself, she has seemed to elude our efforts to categorize or even to name her. Do we call her a novelist? An educationist? A political theorist? A moral philosopher? An historian? A memoirist? A woman of letters? A feminist? Wollstonecraft was all of these things, of course, but to describe her as any single one of them would not only diminish the range as well as the wholeness of her achievement, but also impose decidedly anachronistic territorial distinctions on her literary endeavor.
Because thinking about the miscellaneous appearance of Wollstonecraft’s career as a writer entails rethinking the way we map out fields of knowledge, putting together a volume of this nature is a compelling venture. But, considered more narrowly, it also poses something of a challenge. To be sure, Wollstonecraft’s contributions to specific genres are important, and this collection does not neglect them. As Janet Todd’s essay shows, for example, Wollstonecraft excels as a writer of familiar letters, and any student or scholar interested in understanding her profound originality could do no better than to start here. Moreover, the recent availability of the complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft makes Wollstonecraft’s wide-ranging work as a reviewer for the Analytical Review readily available to readers for the first time. Mitzi Myers’s essay demonstrates how Wollstonecraft’s literary reviews enabled her not only to educate herself but also to develop her own voice as novelist, a subject I in turn take up in my essay on Wollstonecraft’s fiction and its efforts to disrupt customary assumptions about the relations of gender and genre. Nevertheless, the sorts of discrete thematic and generic demarcations that describe other writers’ careers do not always offer us the most productive way of conceiving of Wollstonecraft’s. She does not, in other words, treat religion in one work, education in another, politics and the French Revolution somewhere else, and fiction in a separate place altogether. On the contrary, her works are always re-visiting and re-thinking the same questions – pertaining to moral improvement, liberty, sensibility, reason, duty. Accordingly many of the essays here recur to these same sets of issues in Wollstonecraft’s works, albeit from different angles. Thus, Tom Furniss’s essay on Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution not only examines less well-known works like Vindication of the Rights of Men and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution but also traces surprising changes of her attitude towards monarchy in such later and very different works as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, a work which Mary Favret on the other hand elucidates by uncovering the tension between mobility and confinement as it marks Wollstonecraft’s entire career. Similarly, Alan Richardson and Vivien Jones each agree that everything Wollstonecraft wrote was essentially and urgently about education, but Jones illuminates A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a species of advice and conduct literature, and Richardson assesses it vis-à-vis the pedagogical theory of the time. For Barbara Taylor, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is rooted in Wollstonecraft’s deepest convictions about religion, while for Chris Jones it is rooted in related, but quite distinct, political traditions of the period. It is hoped that these overlapping discussions, differing in their objectives and emphases and sometimes in their conclusions, promote an expansive as well as an intensified appreciation of Wollstonecraft’s work.
As these essays explore Wollstonecraft’s affiliations with specific religious, political, and social traditions, others develop still other new ways of apprehending Wollstonecraft’s achievement. For Susan Wolfson, Wollstonecraft works and thinks foremost as a close, critical, and often highly resistant reader of the high canonical texts of English poetry – Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, among others – and was in a sense the first practicing cultural critic, one who ironically, however, subsequently came herself to constitute a text for the Romantic poets of her own generation, who reinscribed her into the poetic traditions she attempted so incisively to intervene in and transform. Foregrounding the issue of sexuality, a vexed one since Wollstonecraft’s own time, Andrew Elfenbein argues that Wollstonecraft saw herself in terms of an emerging discourse of genius which encouraged and licensed her to upset, among other things, conventional indices of sexuality. As many scholars have noted, the late eighteenth century witnessed an exponential rise of women’s activity in the literary marketplace,6 and Ann Mellor’s essay suggests how Wollstonecraft directly or indirectly inspired traditions and counter-traditions among her female contemporaries. Finally, pondering the question of Wollstonecraft’s presence not in her own time, but in ours, Cora Kaplan’s essay finds that, much as Wollstonecraft herself recurs to the problem of female sensibility and the construction of feminine erotic imagination through literature, so too does Wollstonecraft’s life and work exemplify for modern feminist theory and practice the vexed status of affect and its relation to gender.
If Wollstonecraft only recently had the peculiar status of being a major figure who was nevertheless typically unread, today students are likely to read Wollstonecraft’s works in a wide variety of contexts – in eighteenth-century as well as Romantic studies, in courses on the history of feminism and the emergence of women writers, and in classes about the history of sensibility or of English radical thought. This collection of essays is designed to help students encounter this powerful, daring, and often difficult writer whose career and whose example and whose work continue to inspire and to haunt us.
1. For a fine discussion of Wollstonecraft’s early treatment at the hands of reviewers, see Regina M. Janes, “On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978), 293–302.
2. See Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford, 1905), 15:337–8; Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London, 1798), pp. 13–15.
3. See William Blake’s “Mary,” lines 41ff; Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Boston, 1884), 1, 32–3. Countering the still common assumption that Wollstonecraft had no discernible influence on women writers until the late twentieth century, Roxanne Eberle demonstrates Wollstonecraft’s impact on nineteenth-century fictional representations of women in general and fallen women in particular throughout Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1792–1897: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (Palgrave, 2001), and especially in “Concluding Coda: Writing the New Wollstonecraft.” I am much indebted to Eberle’s study.
4. Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Critical Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 341. This book was first published in 1951.
5. See “Canon, Ideology, and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Adam Smith,” New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986), 69.
6. For the most important recent studies on this score, see Harriet Guest’s splendid, “The Dream of a Common Language: Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft,” Textual-Practice 9:2 (Summer 1995), 303–23; and Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1992).