Ebook: Mary Wollstonecraft

The Mary Wollstonecraft revival began slowly. The first good
modern biography by Ralph Wardle caused little stir when it appeared
in the early 1950s. Before 1960 Wollstonecraft would have
been remembered ( if at all) as vaguely connected with the poet
Shelley, to whom her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was
married; even today she is so often identified with her daughter that
many people think the mother wrote Frankenstein. But in the 1960s,
a decade in which the women's liberation movement developed national
prominence, contemporary scholars recuperated women writers
as well as pioneer theorists of feminism, and so rediscovered Wollstonecraft
and her momentous document, A vindication of the Rights
of woman ( 1792). A new edition of this work was issued in the
late 1960s. Four major Wollstonecraft biographies by Margaret
George, Eleanor Flexner, Claire Tomalin, and En1ily Sunstein followed.
Good, reasonably priced editions of her individual writings, a
bibliography of her works, as well as an anthology and a collected
edition of her letters have already appeared.