"Brings together the pwerful works of a mother/daughter combination... These novels will prove a foundation for any college-level course on literature and feminism."
--The Bookwatch

"A gripping tale of incestuous desire... vitalized by the powerful evocation of nature and the bolder passions of full-blown Romanticism."
--Belles Lettres

This volume for the first time brings together three extraordinary works of fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft, generally recognized as the mother of the feminist movement, and Mary Shelley.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), author and pioneering feminist, answers Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in this, her first stirring political pamphlet. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft refutes Burke's assertions that human liberties are an "entailed inheritance," that the alliance between church and state is necessary for civil order, and that civil authority should be restricted to men "of permanent property." Rather, liberties are rights which all human beings "inherit at their birth, as rational creatures."

Written during a time of great political turmoil, social anxiety, and against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft's argument continues to challenge and inspire. This revised and expanded Third Edition is again based on the 1792 second-edition text and is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations.

"Backgrounds and Contexts" is also significantly expanded and contains twenty-four works organized thematically into these groupings: "Legacies of English Radicalism," "Education," "Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary Moment," and "The Wollstonecraft Debate."...

First published in 1792, this book was written in a spirit of outrage and enthusiasm. In an age of ferment, following the American and French revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft took prevailing egalitarian principles and dared to apply them to women. The introduction discusses her ideas.

This engaging volume was pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's most popular book during her lifetime. Difficult to categorize, it is both an arresting travel book and a moving exploration of her personal and political selves. Wollstonecraft set out for Scandinavia just two weeks after her first suicide attempt, on a mission from the lover whose affections she doubted, to recover his silver on a ship that had gone missing. With her baby daughter and a nursemaid, she traveled across the dramatic landscape and wrote sublime descriptions of the natural world, and the events and people she...

Mary Wollstonecraft was an 18th century British philosopher, writer and feminist. Her best known work was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She also wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft believed that women and men should be treated as equal rational beings and that women only appear to be inferior because of their lack of education. Mary was the wife of philosopher William Godwin and the mother of Mary Shelley who was the author of Frankenstein. In this novel Mary flees her young husband in...

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 1797) published A Vindication of the Rights of Men anonymously in 1790. The pamphlet sold out within three weeks to great acclaim, though later editions published under her own name met with notable opprobrium. It was the first of many printed responses to Edmund Burke's conservative attacks on the French Revolution, and it marked Wollstonecraft's entry into the intellectual arena of the late eighteenth century. She attacked hereditary privilege and political conservatism, arguing for codified civil rights and political liberty. She also highlighted Burke's gendered...

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 1797) published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. It was written in reaction to Rousseau's Emile (1762), which argued that the purpose of a girl's education was to make her useful to a man. Wollstonecraft offered a defence of woman's ability to reason, given appropriate education. She argued that the limited education given to women made them docile and empty-headed playthings whose supposed fragility and coquetry were constructions that damaged not only the individual but society as a whole. Her radical prescription was for girls to be educated alongside...

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 1797) published this book, the last before her death in childbirth, in 1796. The twenty-five letters are an account of a daring wartime trip to Scandinavia to attempt to retrieve a stolen ship for her lover, the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. Her letters describe the people and culture she encountered, as well as the beautiful natural surroundings she observed. But in addition to a travelogue these letters include political reflections on controversial topics such as prison reform, as well as revealing a very personal story of inner turmoil and dislocation....