Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the most distinctive letter writers of the 18th century. She talked and thought on paper and her letters were a large part of the drama of her life. In them she grows from an awkward child of 14 to the woman of 38 facing death in childbirth. At different times they reveal her very modern desire to reconcile the irreconcilable: integrity and sexual longing, the needs and duties of a woman, motherhood and intellectual life, fame and domesticity, reason and passion. Written on the hoof in cramped lodgings or swaying boats, in the wilds of Scandinavia or freezing Paris, they form a remarkable autobiographical document. With flashes of genius, these letters are compelling reading.

The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Classics

Both of Wollstonecraft's novels criticize what she viewed as the patriarchal institution of marriage and its deleterious effects on women. In her first novel, Mary: A Fiction, the eponymous heroine is forced into a loveless marriage for economic reasons; she fulfills her desire for love and affection outside of marriage with two passionate romantic friendships, one with a woman and one with a man. Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman novel published posthumously and often considered Wollstonecraft's most radical feminist work, revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband; like Mary, Maria also finds fulfillment outside of marriage, in an affair with a fellow inmate and a friendship with one of her keepers. Neither of Wollstonecraft's novels depict successful marriages, although she posits such relationships in the Rights of Woman.

Mary and the Wrongs of Women

Oxford University Press

Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Mary Wollstonecraft is 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 established as texts of feminist thought. Writing in the 18th century, her social commentary challenged the other eminent thinkers of the day, including Edmund Burke, and confronted the major events of the period, like the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft was a persuasive writer and thinker who never felt compelled to separate her femaleness from her writing. "A Wollstonecraft Anthology" is a selection which includes the best writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. It brings together both the well-known texts and a range of material which is less familiar: the great polemical "A Vindication of the Rights of Men, The French Revolution", her early educational writings, her letters to Gilbert Imlay and William Godwin and her reviews of fiction. The volume provides an overview of Wollstonecraft's work and enables the reader to make a judgement on her political, literary and philosophical development. The book aims to provide a suitable textbook for courses in women's studies, political theory, literary theory, philosophy and history. The volume includes an introduction by Janet Todd.

A Wollstonecraft Anthology

Indiana University Press

Excerpt from Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and DenmarkQueen's Row, Hoxton. His daughter Mary was then six teen; and while at Hoxton she had her education advanced by the friendly care of a deformed clergyman - a Mr. Clare who lived next door, and stayed so much at home that his one pair of shoes had lasted him for fourteen years.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Classic Reprint)

Children's Books

Forgotten Books

Original Stories From Real Life: With Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness

Original Stories from Real Life: With Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness

Franklin Classics Trade Press

Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

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. Her book is both a sustained argument for emancipation and an attack on a social and economic system. As Miriam Brody points out in her introduction, subsequent feminists tended to lose sight of her radical objectives. For Mary Wollstonecraft all aspects of women's existence were interrelated, and any effective reform depended on the redistribution of political and economic power.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism (A Norton Critical Edition)

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Norton

THE PUBLIC are here presented with the last literary attempt of an author whose fame has been uncommonly extensive and whose talents have probably been most admired by the persons by whom talents are estimated with the greatest accuracy and discrimination.

Maria: Or, The wrongs of woman (The Norton library, N761)

Humor & Satire

In Maria, Wollstonecraft pursues in fictional form themes set forth in 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.' 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.

Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman

W.W.Norton&Company

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Books by Mary Wollstonecraft