Abstract
A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published at the end of November 1790 and transformed Wollstonecraft from a successful — for a woman, very successful — but obscure hack-writer to a social critic and public figure. Yet she may not have written the Vindication but for Henry Fuseli and Joseph Johnson. Fuseli had the broad classical, literary and artistic knowledge to inform her break from women’s writing into political polemics, and Johnson shamed her into completing the work when she was ready to give it up halfway through.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
On Fuseli, see John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, 3 vols (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831)
Eudo C. Mason, The Mind of Henry Fuseli (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951)
Frederick Antal, Fuseli Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956)
Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972)
Nicolas Powell, Fuseli: The Nightmare (London: Allan Lane, 1973)
Carol Louise Hall, Blake and Fuseli: A Study in the Transmission of Ideas (New York and London: Garland, 1985)
John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1986).
See J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Donald Cross Bryant, ‘The Contemporary Reception of Edmund Burke’s Speaking’, in Historical Studies of Rhetoric and Rhetoricians, ed. Raymond F. Howes (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961).
Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
Cf. James T. Boulton’s account of the Vindication, in The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963) pp. 167–76.
Mitzi Myers, ‘Politics from the Outside: Mary Wollstonecraft’s First Vindication’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 6 (1977) p. 119.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1st ed (London: Joseph Johnson, 1790).
See G. J. Barker-Benfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthwoman’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 50 (1989) pp. 95–115.
Edmund Burke, Reflections of the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1968) p. 197.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1992 Gary Donald Kelly
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kelly, G. (1992). From the Rights of Men to Revolutionary Feminism. In: Revolutionary Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22063-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22063-2_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-22065-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-22063-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)