Abstract
In the winter of 1795–6 Wollstonecraft faced social ostracism as a single woman with a child. She faced the possibility of public vilification, as reaction against the French Revolution was being orchestrated into an attack on radical wings of the professional cultural revolution in Britain, including advocates of the rights of women. She also faced the immediate task of recommencing her career. In January 1796 she wrote to the Irish revolutionary Archibald Hamilton Rowan, then in the United States: ‘I live, but for my child — for I am weary of myself.’ But she had resumed her professional career: ‘now I am writing for independence’ (Letters, p. 328). In a postscript she noted that the political reaction in England might make things more difficult for her — ‘The state of public affairs here are not in a posture to assuage private sorrow.’
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Notes
There are several accounts of Godwin’s philosophy, but see Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980)
Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986).
William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, with Mary Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, ed. Richard Holmes (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1987) p. 256.
William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989)
See Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)
Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1989) pp. 59–64.
Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Mary’ and ‘The Wrongs of Woman’, ed. Gary Kelly (London: Oxford University Press, 1976) p. 73.
S. D. Harasym, ‘Ideology and Self: a Theoretical Discussion of the “Self” in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Fiction’, English Studies in Canada, vol. 12 (June 1986) p. 164.
For a different reading of the novel as political, see Tilottama Rajan, ‘Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel’, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 27 (Summer 1988) pp. 228–39.
Christopher Hibbert, George IV (1972, 1973; London: Penguin Books, 1976)
Cited in Mitzi Myers, ‘Unfinished Business: Wollstonecraff’s Maria’, Wordsworth Circle, vol. 11 (Spring 1980) p. 110.
Robert D. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (New York: Henry Holt, 1957)
Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (1987; Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1990) pp. 148–55.
Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986) p. 134.
Wollstonecraff’s appropriation of the conventionally masculine domain of the sublime anticipates certain themes in modern feminist theory; see Patricia Yaeger, ‘Toward a Female Sublime’, in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
Mitzi Myers, ‘Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: the Shaping of Self and Subject’, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 20 (Fall 1981) p. 316.
See R. M. Janes, ‘On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraff’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 39 (1978) pp. 293–302
Marcelle Thiébaux, ‘Mary Wolstonecraft in Federalist America: 1791–1802’, in The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, ed. Donald H. Reiman et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1978).
Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983) p. 9.
William Bates, The Maclise Portrait Gallery (London: Chatto and Win-dus, 1883) p. 274
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Flora Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, 2nd edn (Paris: H. L. Delloye; London: W. Jeffs, 1840) p. 323.
Margaret Fuller, ‘The Great Lawsuit’, The Dial, vol. 4 (July 1843) p. 29
George Eliot, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’ (1855), in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) p. 201
See Janet Todd, A Mary Wollstonecraft Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1976).
M. G. Fawcett, Introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891) p. 30
Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett (London: Women’s Press, 1979) pp. 103
Françoise Basch, Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel, trans. Anthony Rudolf (New York: Schocken Books, 1974) p. 10
Rosalind Miles, The Women’s History of the World (London: Paladin, 1988) p. 234
Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (Boulder, Col. and San Francisco, Cal.: Westview Press, 1989) pp. 13–17.
Mary Jacobus, ‘The Difference of View’, in Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm with Oxford University Women’s Studies Committee; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979) p. 10
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago, Ill., and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 46
Cora Kaplan, ‘Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism’, in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Green and Coppélia Kahn (London and New York: Methuen, 1985) p. 154.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
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© 1992 Gary Donald Kelly
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Kelly, G. (1992). Love, Marriage and the Wrongs of Woman. In: Revolutionary Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22063-2_8
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