Mary Wollstonecraft (, ; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights.
She died 11 days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would become an accomplished writer and author of Frankenstein. ==Biography== ===Early life=== Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London.
I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again." She was buried in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, where her tombstone reads "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Born 27 April 1759: Died 10 September 1797." ==Posthumous, Godwin's Memoirs== In January 1798 Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Johnson himself, however, became much more than a friend; she described him in her letters as a father and a brother. In London, Wollstonecraft lived on Dolben Street, in Southwark; an up-and-coming area following the opening of the first Blackfriars Bridge in 1769. While in London, Wollstonecraft pursued a relationship with the artist Henry Fuseli, even though he was already married.
The second and more important friendship was with Fanny (Frances) Blood, introduced to Wollstonecraft by the Clares, a couple in Hoxton who became parental figures to her; Wollstonecraft credited Blood with opening her mind. Unhappy with her home life, Wollstonecraft struck out on her own in 1778 and accepted a job as a lady's companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath.
In 1780 she returned home upon being called back to care for her dying mother.
In a defining moment in 1784, she persuaded Eliza, who was suffering from what was probably postpartum depression, to leave her husband and infant; Wollstonecraft made all of the arrangements for Eliza to flee, demonstrating her willingness to challenge social norms.
Despite the change of surroundings Blood's health further deteriorated when she became pregnant, and in 1785 Wollstonecraft left the school and followed Blood to nurse her, but to no avail.
Blood's death devastated Wollstonecraft and was part of the inspiration for her first novel, A Fiction (1788). ==='The first of a new genus'=== After Blood's death in 1785, Wollstonecraft's friends helped her obtain a position as governess to the daughters of the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family in Ireland.
However, Wollstonecraft had trouble getting along with the irascible woman (an experience she drew on when describing the drawbacks of such a position in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787).
As she wrote to her sister Everina in 1787, she was trying to become 'the first of a new genus'.
About the events of 5–6 October 1789, when the royal family was marched from Versailles to Paris by a group of angry housewives, Burke praised Queen Marie Antoinette as a symbol of the refined elegance of the ancien régime, who was surrounded by 'furies from hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women'.
Wollstonecraft argued instead that the revolution arose from a set of social, economic and political conditions that left no other way out of the crisis that gripped France in 1789. An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was a difficult balancing act for Wollstonecraft.
She condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, but at same time she argued that the revolution was a great achievement, which led her to stop her history in late 1789 rather than write about the Terror of 1793–94.
Edmund Burke had ended his Reflections on the Revolution in France with reference to the events of 5–6 October 1789, when a group of women from Paris forced the French royal family from the Palace of Versailles to Paris.
Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790, and so angered Wollstonecraft that she spent the rest of the month writing her rebuttal.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke was published on 29 November 1790, initially anonymously; the second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published on 18 December, and this time the publisher revealed Wollstonecraft as the author. Wollstonecraft called the French Revolution a 'glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe'.
Wollstonecraft's fame extended across the English channel, for when the French statesmen Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord visited London in 1792, he visited her, during which she asked that French girls be given the same right to an education that French boys were being offered by the new regime in France. ===France=== Wollstonecraft left for Paris in December 1792 and arrived about a month before Louis XVI was guillotined.
Then, on 12 April 1793, all foreigners were forbidden to leave France.
On 16 October 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined; among her charges and convictions, she was found guilty of committing incest with her son.
On 31 October 1793, most of the Girondin leaders were guillotined; when Imlay broke the news to Wollstonecraft, she fainted.
In 1793, the British government had begun a crackdown on radicals, suspending civil liberties, imposing drastic censorship, and trying for treason anyone suspected of sympathy with the revolution, which led Wollstonecraft to fear she would be imprisoned if she returned. The winter of 1794–95 was the coldest winter in Europe for over a century, which reduced Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny to desperate circumstances.
She condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, but at same time she argued that the revolution was a great achievement, which led her to stop her history in late 1789 rather than write about the Terror of 1793–94.
In a March 1794 letter to her sister Everina, Wollstonecraft wrote: It is impossible for you to have any idea of the impression the sad scenes I have been a witness to have left on my mind ...
death and misery, in every shape of terrour, haunts this devoted country—I certainly am glad that I came to France, because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded. Wollstonecraft soon became pregnant by Imlay, and on 14 May 1794 she gave birth to her first child, Fanny, naming her after perhaps her closest friend.
While at Le Havre in northern France, she wrote a history of the early revolution, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, which was published in London in December 1794.
In August 1794, Imlay departed for London and promised to return soon.
In 1793, the British government had begun a crackdown on radicals, suspending civil liberties, imposing drastic censorship, and trying for treason anyone suspected of sympathy with the revolution, which led Wollstonecraft to fear she would be imprisoned if she returned. The winter of 1794–95 was the coldest winter in Europe for over a century, which reduced Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny to desperate circumstances.
It was first published in London in 1794, but a second edition did not appear until 1989.
After she left France on 7 April 1795, she continued to refer to herself as 'Mrs Imlay', even to her sisters, in order to bestow legitimacy upon her child. The British historian Tom Furniss called An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution the most neglected of Wollstonecraft's books.
Wollstonecraft argued that aristocratic values, by emphasising a woman's body and her ability to be charming over her mind and character, had encouraged women like Marie Antoinette to be manipulative and ruthless, making the queen into a corrupted and corrupting product of the ancien régime. ===England and William Godwin=== Seeking Imlay, Wollstonecraft returned to London in April 1795, but he rejected her.
In May 1795 she attempted to commit suicide, probably with laudanum, but Imlay saved her life (although it is unclear how).
She recounted her travels and thoughts in letters to Imlay, many of which were eventually published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796.
Mary Wollstonecraft (, ; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights.
After their marriage on 29 March 1797, Godwin and Wollstonecraft moved to 29 The Polygon, Somers Town.
By all accounts, theirs was a happy and stable, though brief, relationship. ===Birth of Mary, death=== On 30 August 1797, Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter, Mary.
I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again." She was buried in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, where her tombstone reads "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Born 27 April 1759: Died 10 September 1797." ==Posthumous, Godwin's Memoirs== In January 1798 Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again." She was buried in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, where her tombstone reads "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Born 27 April 1759: Died 10 September 1797." ==Posthumous, Godwin's Memoirs== In January 1798 Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
(Still, as Craciun points out, new editions of Rights of Woman appeared in the UK in the 1840s and in the US in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s.) If readers were few, then many were inspired; one such reader was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who read Rights of Woman at age 12 and whose poem Aurora Leigh reflected Wollstonecraft's unwavering focus on education.
(Still, as Craciun points out, new editions of Rights of Woman appeared in the UK in the 1840s and in the US in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s.) If readers were few, then many were inspired; one such reader was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who read Rights of Woman at age 12 and whose poem Aurora Leigh reflected Wollstonecraft's unwavering focus on education.
Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Americans who met in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, discovered they both had read Wollstonecraft, and they agreed upon the need for (what became) the Seneca Falls Convention, an influential women's rights meeting held in 1848.
Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Americans who met in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, discovered they both had read Wollstonecraft, and they agreed upon the need for (what became) the Seneca Falls Convention, an influential women's rights meeting held in 1848.
Fuller was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights activist who, like Wollstonecraft, had travelled to the Continent and had been involved in the struggle for reform (in this case the 1849 Roman Republic)—and she had a child by a man without marrying him.
(Still, as Craciun points out, new editions of Rights of Woman appeared in the UK in the 1840s and in the US in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s.) If readers were few, then many were inspired; one such reader was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who read Rights of Woman at age 12 and whose poem Aurora Leigh reflected Wollstonecraft's unwavering focus on education.
In 1855, she devoted an essay to the roles and rights of women, comparing Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller.
Wollstonecraft's children's tales were adapted by Charlotte Mary Yonge in 1870. Wollstonecraft's work was exhumed with the rise of the movement to give women a political voice.
First was an attempt at rehabilitation in 1879 with the publication of Wollstonecraft's Letters to Imlay, with prefatory memoir by Charles Kegan Paul.
Then followed the first full-length biography, which was by Elizabeth Robins Pennell; it appeared in 1884 as part of a series by the Roberts Brothers on famous women.
By 1898, Wollstonecraft was the subject of a first doctoral thesis and its resulting book. With the advent of the modern feminist movement, women as politically dissimilar from each other as Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman embraced Wollstonecraft's life story.
A biography published in 1932 refers to recent reprints of her works, incorporating new research, and to a "study" in 1911, a play in 1922, and another biography in 1924.
A biography published in 1932 refers to recent reprints of her works, incorporating new research, and to a "study" in 1911, a play in 1922, and another biography in 1924.
A biography published in 1932 refers to recent reprints of her works, incorporating new research, and to a "study" in 1911, a play in 1922, and another biography in 1924.
By 1929 Woolf described Wollstonecraft—her writing, arguments, and "experiments in living"—as immortal: "she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living".
A biography published in 1932 refers to recent reprints of her works, incorporating new research, and to a "study" in 1911, a play in 1922, and another biography in 1924.
Interest in her never completely died, with full-length biographies in 1937 and 1951. With the emergence of feminist criticism in academia in the 1960s and 1970s, Wollstonecraft's works returned to prominence.
Interest in her never completely died, with full-length biographies in 1937 and 1951. With the emergence of feminist criticism in academia in the 1960s and 1970s, Wollstonecraft's works returned to prominence.
Interest in her never completely died, with full-length biographies in 1937 and 1951. With the emergence of feminist criticism in academia in the 1960s and 1970s, Wollstonecraft's works returned to prominence.
Interest in her never completely died, with full-length biographies in 1937 and 1951. With the emergence of feminist criticism in academia in the 1960s and 1970s, Wollstonecraft's works returned to prominence.
Their fortunes reflected that of the second wave of the North American feminist movement itself; for example, in the early 1970s, six major biographies of Wollstonecraft were published that presented her "passionate life in apposition to radical and rationalist agenda".
It was first published in London in 1794, but a second edition did not appear until 1989.
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