Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - Walpole called her 'a...

In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen,...

Mary Wollstonecraft is widely recognized as a social and political thinker of major significance and as one of the most important and influential of the early feminists. Some of her works, such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, have become central texts of feminist thought. Written in the eighteenth century, her social commentary challenged the other eminent thinkers of the day, including Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and confronted the major events of the period, such as the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft was a persuasive writer and thinker who never felt compelled...

You will smile at an observation that has just occurred to me: --I consider those minds as the most strong and original, whose imagination acts as the stimulus to their senses, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in a letter contemplating the role of the imagination in human relationships. Enlightenment feminist and famed author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was also one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century. This volume contains all of her known correspondence.

Wollstonecraft talked and thought on paper; her letters were a large part...

First published in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was an instant success, turning its thirty-three-year-old author into a minor celebrity. A pioneering work of early feminism that extends to women the Enlightenment principle of -the rights of man, - its argument remains as relevant today as it was for Woll-stonecraft's contemporaries. -Mary Wollstonecraft was not the first writer to call for women to receive a real, challenging education, - writes Katha Pollitt in the new Introduction. -But she was the first to connect the education of women to the transformation of women's social...

Her story of a woman incarcerated in a madhouse by her abusive husband dramatizes the effect of the English marriage laws, which made women virtually the property of their husbands.

In an era of revolutions demanding greater liberties for mankind, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an ardent feminist who spoke eloquently for countless women of her time.
Having witnessed firsthand the devastating results of male improvidence, she assumed an independent role early in life, educating herself and eventually earning a living as a governess, teacher and writer. She was also an esteemed member of the radical intellectual circle that included William Godwin (father of her daughter, novelist Mary Godwin Shelley, and later her husband), Thomas Paine, William Blake, Henry...

Mary Wollstonecraft is remembered principally as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and there has been a tendency to view her most famous work in isolation. Yet Wollstonecraft's pronouncements about women grew out of her reflections on men, and her views on the female sex constituted an integral part of a wider moral and political critique of her times that she first fully formulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). This fully annotated edition brings these two works together.

The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin mirror the relationship of a remarkable literary couple. The correspondence collected here covers the period from July 13, 1796, to August 30, 1797, when "their friendship turned to romance, their romance to passion, their passion to consummation, their affair to a highly unconventional marriage during which they lived far enough apart to permit the continuing exchange of letters. Wardle, a superb editor, provides just enough annotation to allow the relationship to unfold by itself through the correspondence of these two doctrinaire...

This is the first and only complete edition of all the published writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of the feminist movement. Wollstonecraft's writings include fiction, journalism, reviews, and diaries, and confirm her place in history as a significant force in the young rationalist movement in education and politics. The set features extensive footnotes, a comprehensive index, a general introduction, and specialist introductions to each selection, and is handsomely bound in pure woven cloth over millboard.