SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following are among the most important and widely cited works about Wollstonecraft and her period. For a comprehensive listing of books and articles about Wollstonecraft from her own time through 1975, see Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft: an Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976).
Biographical Studies
Flexner, Eleanor. Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972.
George, Margaret. One Woman’s “Situation”: a Study of Mary Wollstonecraft. Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1970.
Godwin, William. Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London, 1798. Also the supplemented edition by W. Clark Durant. London: Constable; New York: Greenberg, 1927.
Hays, Mary. “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Annual Necrology, 1797–8. (London: 1800), 411–60.
James, H. R. Mary Wollstonecraft, a Sketch. London: Oxford University Press, 1932.
Nixon, Edna. Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Life and Times. London: Dent, 1971.
Paul, C. Kegan. William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries. London, 1876.
Pennell, Elizabeth Robins. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. London, 1885.
Sunstein, Emily. A Different Face: the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co, 1975.
Taylor, G. R. Stirling. Mary Wollstonecraft: a Study in Economics and Romance. London: Secker, 1911.
Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: a Revolutionary Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000.
Tomalin, Claire, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1974. Rev. edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
Wardle, Ralph M., Mary Wollstonecraft: a Critical Biography. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1951.
Selected editions of letters and works
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Carol H. Poston. 2nd edn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.
A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman.” Ed. Richard Holmes. London: Penguin, 1987.
The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Ralph M. Wardle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.
The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd. Forthcoming Penguin Press 2002.
The Vindications. Eds. D. L. Macdonald & Kathleen Scherf. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997.
The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols. Eds. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd. London: Pickering & Chatto; New York: New York University Press, 1989.
Books and articles about Wollstonecraft and her age
Barker-Benfield, G. J. “Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealth-woman.” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 95–115.
Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Basker, James. “Radical Affinities: Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson.” Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon. Eds. Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996: 51–5.
Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Butler, Marilyn, ed. Burke Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Conger, Syndy. “The Sentimental Logic of Wollstonecraft’s Prose.” Prose Studies 10/2 (September 1987): 143–58.
Conger, Syndy. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility. London: Associated University Presses, 1994.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Hall, Catherine. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London: Hutchinson, 1987.
Deane, Seamus. The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Everest, Kelvin, ed. Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991.
Favret, Mary. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Ferguson, Frances. “Wollstonecraft Our Contemporary.” Gender and Theory: Dialogues in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989: 51–62.
Furniss, Tom. “Gender in Revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft.” Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution. Ed. Kelvin Everest. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, Open University Press, 1991.
Furniss, Tom. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Goldman, Emma. “Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Struggle for Freedom.” Feminist Studies 7 (1981): 114–21.
Gubar, Susan. “Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of ‘It takes one to Know One.’” Feminist Studies 20:3 (1994): 453–73.
Guest, Harriet. “The Dream of a Common Language: Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft.” Textual-Practice 9:2 (Summer 1995): 303–23.
Guest, Harriet. “Eighteenth-century Femininity: ‘A Supposed Sexual Character.’” Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800. Ed. Vivien Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 46–68.
Guest, Harriet. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Guralnick, Elissa. “Radical Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Studies in Burke and Hist Time 18 (1977): 155–66.
Guralnick, Elissa. “Rhetorical Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Humanities Association Review 30 (1979): 174–85.
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: the Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Hill, Bridget. “The Links between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay: New Evidence.” Women’s History Review 4 (1995): 177–92.
Jacobus, Mary. “The Difference of View.” Women Writing and Writing about Women. Ed. Mary Jacobus. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979: 1–21.
Jacobus, Mary. “In Love with a Cold Climate: Traveling with Wollstonecraft.” First Things: the Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1995: 63–82.
Janes, R. M. “On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 293–302.
Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Jones, Chris, Radical Sensibility. London: Routledge, 1993.
Jones, Robert. Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: the Analysis of Beauty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Jones, Vivien. “Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams.” Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832. Eds. Stephen Copley and John Whale. London and New York: Routledge, 1992: 178–99.
Jones, Vivien. “The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature.” Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. Eds. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996: 108–32.
Jones, Vivien. “The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. 20:2 (Autumn 1997): 187–205.
Jump, Harriet Devine, “No Equal Mind: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Young Romantics.” Charles Lamb Bulletin, New Series, 79 (July 1992): 225–38.
Jump, Harriet Devine, Mary Wollstonecraft: Writer. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
Kaplan, Cora. “Wild nights: pleasure/sexuality/feminism.” The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality. Eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. London: Methuen, 1987: 160–84.
Kaplan, Cora.
“Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist-Feminist Criticism.”
British Feminist Thought: a Reader. Ed. Terry Lovell. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990: 345–66.
Kay, Carol. “Canon, Ideology, and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Adam Smith,” New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986): 63–76.
Kelly, Gary. “Mary Wollstonecraft as Vir Bonus.” English Studies in Canada 5 (1979): 275–91.
Kelly, Gary. “Expressive Style and ‘The Female Mind’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century: Transactions of the Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment 4 (1980): 1942–9.
Kelly, Gary. English Fiction of the Romantic Period. London, New York: Longman, 1989.
Kelly, Gary. Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Kelly, Gary. “[Female] Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and Female Sexuality.” Women’s Writing 4 (1997): 139–54.
Klein, Lawrence. “Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in early Eighteenth-Century England.” Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices. Eds. Judith Still and Michael Worton. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.
Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Landes, Joan B. “Mary Does, Alice Doesn’t: the Paradox of Female Reason in and for Feminist Theory.” Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminism. Ed. Eileen Janes Yeo. New York: Rivers Oram Press, 1997: 50–60.
Langbauer, Laurie. Women and Romance: the Consolations of Gender in the English Novel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York and London: Routledge Press, 1993.
Mellor, Anne K. “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19 (1996): 413–24.
Mellor, Anne K. Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Maurer, Lisa Shawn. “The Female (As) Reader: Sex, Sensibility, and the Maternal in Wollstonecraft’s Fictions.” Essays in Literature 19 (1992): 36–54.
Moore, Jane. Mary Wollstonecraft. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999.
Myers, Mitzi. “Politics from the Outside: Mary Wollstonecraft’s First Vindication.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 6 (1977): 113–32.
Myers, Mitzi. “Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written . . . in Sweden: Towards Romantic Autobiography.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 8 (1979): 165–85.
Myers, Mitzi. “Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books.” Children’s Literature, eds. Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), XIV.31–59.
Myers, Mitzi. “‘A Taste for Truth and Realities’: Early Advice to Mothers on Books for Girls.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 12/3 (Fall 1987): 118–24.
Myers, Mitzi.
“Pedagogy as Self-Expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice.”
The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988: 192–210.
Myers, Mitzi. “Sensibility and the ‘Walk of Reason’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique.” Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics. Ed. Syndy Conger McMillen. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990: 120–44.
Nyström, Per. “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Journey.” Acts of the Royal Society of Arts and Letters of Gothenburg, Humaniora 17 (1980).
Paulson, Ronald, Representations of Revolution. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1983.
Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Poston, Carol H., and Todd, Janet M. “Some Textual Variations in the First Two Editions of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Mary Wollstonecraft Journal 2:2 (May 1974): 27–9.
Rajan, Tillotama. “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel.” Studies in Romanticism 27 (1988): 221–51.
Rajan, Tillotama. The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Rendall, Jane. The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860. London: Macmillan, 1985.
Reiss, Timothy. “Revolution in Bounds: Wollstonecraft, Women, and Reason.” Gender and Theory: Dialogues in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kaufman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Richardson, Alan. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.
Roper, Derek. “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reviews.” Notes and Queries n.s. 5 (January 1958): 37–8.
Roper, Derek. Reviewing before the “Edinburgh,” 1788–1802. London: Methuen, 1978.
Sapiro, Virginia. A Vindication of Political Virtue: the Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Shevelow, Kathryn. Women and Print Culture: the Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge, 1989.
Stewart, Sally. “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to the Analytical Review,” Essays in Literature 11:2 (Fall 1984): 187–99.
Taylor, Barbara. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. London: Virago, 1983.
Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Radical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Tauchert, Ashley. “Maternity, Castration and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution.” Women’s Writing 4:2 (1997): 173–99.
Tauchert, Ashley.
“The Union of the Sexes: Female Embodiment and Same Sex Desire in Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”
QWERTY 9 (October, 1999): 281–9.
Thiebaux, Marcelle. “Mary Wollstonecraft in Federalist America.” The Evidence of the Imagination. Eds. Donald Rieman, Michael C. Jaye, and Betty T. Bennet. New York: New York University Press, 1978: 195–235.
Todd, Janet. “The Language of Sex in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Mary Wollstonecraft Newsletter 1 (1973): 10–17.
Todd, Janet. “The Polwhelan Tradition and Richard Cobb.” Studies in Burke and His Time 16 (1975): 271–7.
Todd, Janet. “The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Signs 1 (1976): 721–34.
Todd, Janet. Women’s Friendship in Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
Todd, Janet. Sensibility: an Introduction. London: Methuen, 1986.
Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angelica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Todd, Janet. “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Death.” Gender, Art and Death. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993: 102–19.
Ty, Eleanor. Unsex’d Revolutionaries – Five Women Novelists of the 1790s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
Tyson, Gerald P. Joseph Johnson: a Liberal Publisher. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979.
Wang, Orrin N. C. “The Other Reasons: Female Alterity and Enlightenment Discourse in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Yale Journal of Criticism 5:1 (1991): 129–49.
Wardle, Ralph M. “Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer.” PMLA 62:4 (December 1947): 1000–9.
Woolf, Virginia. “Mary Wollstonecraft.” The Nation and Athenaeum 46 (5 October 1929): 13–15. Rpt. “Four Figures.” The Common Reader, 2nd Series. London: Hograth Press, 1932: 140–72.