## 1. Biography



The second of seven children, Mary Wollstonecraft was born in
Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759, in a house on Primrose Street.
Her paternal grandfather was a successful master weaver who left a
sizeable legacy, but her father, Edward John, mismanaged his share of
the inheritance. He tried to establish himself as a gentleman farmer
in Epping. This was the first of the family's several moves, each of
which marked its financial and social decline. Only Mary's brother,
Edward (Ned), was to receive a formal education; he became a lawyer.
He had also inherited directly from his grandfather a substantial part
of the latter's legacy.



Wollstonecraft's own somewhat haphazard education was, however, not
entirely unusual for someone of her sex and position, nor was it
particularly deficient. Her published writings show her to have
acquired a true command of the Bible and a good knowledge of the works
of several of the most famous Ancient philosophers. The latter is
partly explained through her personal acquaintance with Thomas Taylor,
famed for his translations of Plato (Tomaselli 2019). She also drew on a variety of
early modern sources, such as Shakespeare and Milton's works. Through
her own writing for the *Analytical Review* she was to become
widely read in the literature of her period. Initially, the nature and
extent of her reading was partly owed to the friendship shown to her
in her youth by a retired clergyman and his wife. Nevertheless, as a
woman from an impecunious family, her prospects were very limited. In
relatively rapid succession, she was to enter the most likely
occupations for someone of her sex and circumstances: a lady's
companion, a schoolteacher, and a governess.



In 1778, she was engaged as a companion to a Mrs Dawson and lived at
Bath. She returned home to nurse her ailing mother in the latter part
of 1781. After Mrs Wollstonecraft's death, in the spring of 1782, Mary
lived with the Bloods, the impoverished family of her dearest friend,
Fanny. In the winter of 1783, Mary left them in order to attend to her
sister Eliza and her newly born daughter. There followed the first of
the emotionally very difficult episodes in Mary's life. What prompted
Mary to intervene as decisively as she did in her sister's marriage
remains somewhat of a mystery; but in the course of January 1784, Mary
took her sister away, and the two women went into hiding, leaving
Eliza's infant daughter behind; the baby died the following
August.



By February of that year, the two sisters had already been planning to
establish a school with Fanny Blood. Mary's other sister, Everina,
joined in the project a little later. They first set their sights on
Islington, then moved to Newington Green, where Mary met the moral and
political thinker, the Reverend Richard Price, head of Newington's
thriving Dissenting community, and heard him preach. This was a
crucial encounter for Mary. Several years later, she was to rise to
his defence in a *Vindication of* *the Rights of Men*
(1790), and it was through her connections to members of this
community that she was to gain an introduction to her future
publisher, friend, and one might even say, patron, Joseph Johnson.



In November 1785, Wollstonecraft set off on a trip to Lisbon, where
her friend Fanny, who had married that February, was expecting her
first child. On board the ship, Mary met a man suffering from
consumption; she nursed him for a fortnight, the length of the
journey. This experience is related in her first novel, *Mary, a
Fiction* (1788). She gained a very unfavourable opinion of
Portuguese life and society, which seemed to her ruled by
irrationality and superstitions. Mary's brief stay in Portugal was,
furthermore, to be a profoundly unhappy one, for both Fanny and her
baby died shortly after the delivery.



On her return to England, Wollstonecraft found her school in a dire
state. Far from providing her with a reliable income and some
stability, it was to be a source of endless worries and a financial
drain. Only Joseph Johnson's advance on her first
book, *Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on
Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life* (1787) helped
ease her considerable financial difficulties. It consists of brief
discussions on such topics as 'Moral Discipline',
'Artificial Manners', 'Boardings-Schools',
'The Benefits Which Arise From Disappointments',
'The Observance of Sunday', and 'On the Treatment of
Servants'. Although it might seem somewhat cursory, this book
served as the groundwork for many of the topics to which she would
return in her more famous works of the 1790s.



Following the collapse of her school, Wollstonecraft became a
governess to the family of Lord Kingsborough for a brief and
unsatisfactory period. The position took her to Ireland, where she
completed *Mary, A Fiction*. On her return to London, Joseph
Johnson came to the rescue once again by giving her some literary
employment. In 1787, she also began, but never completed, *The Cave
of Fancy. A Tale*. The same year, she wrote *Original Stories
from Real Life; with Conversations, calculated to Regulate the
Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness* (1788); it
appeared in two other London editions in her life time (1791 and
1796), the last of which illustrated by William Blake.
Wollstonecraft's anthology, *The Female Reader; Miscellaneous
Pieces in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best Writers and Disposed
under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women* (1789),
was compiled in the same period and published under the name of
'Mr. Cresswick, teacher of Elocution'; it pursues themes
to be found in her previous works and contains excerpts mostly from
the Bible and Shakespeare's plays, as well as many by various
eighteenth-century authors, such as Voltaire, Hume, Steele, Charlotte
Smith, and Madame de Genlis.



To understand the extent to which Wollstonecraft made up for the lack
of a formal education, it is essential to appreciate fully that her
talents were to extend to translating and reviewing, and that these
two activities, quite apart from her own intellectual curiosity,
acquainted her with a great many authors, including Leibniz and Kant.
She translated into English Jacques Necker's *Of the Importance of
Religious Opinions* (1788) from French, Rev. C. G. Salzmann's *Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; with an Introductory
Address to Parents* (1790) from German, and Madame de Cambon's
*Young Grandison* (1790) from Dutch. In each case, the texts
she produced were almost as if her own, not just because she was in
agreement with their original authors, but because she more or less
re-wrote them. The Reverend Salzmann is unlikely to have resented her
for this, as he was to translate into German both *A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman* and William Godwin's *Memoirs of the
Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1798).



Throughout the period covered by these translations Wollstonecraft
wrote for the *Analytical Review*, which her publisher, Joseph
Johnson, together with Thomas Christie, started in May 1788. She was
involved with this publication either as a reviewer or as editorial
assistant for most of its relatively short life. Despite her own
practice of the genre, her many reviews reveal the degree to which,
she, like many other moralists in the eighteenth century, feared the
moral consequences of reading novels. She believed that even those of
a relatively superior quality encouraged vanity and selfishness. She
was to concede, however, that reading such works might nonetheless be
better than not reading at all. Besides novels, Wollstonecraft
reviewed poetry, travel accounts, educational works, collected
sermons, biographies, natural histories, and essays and treatises on
subjects such as Shakespeare, happiness, theology, music, architecture
and the awfulness of solitary confinement; the authors whose works she
commented on included Madame de Stael, Emanuel Swedenborg, Lord
Kames, Rousseau, and William Smellie. Until the end of 1789, her
articles were mostly of a moral and aesthetic nature. However, in
December 1789, she reviewed a speech by her old friend, Richard Price,
entitled *A Discourse on the Love of our Country, delivered on Nov.
4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for
Commemorating the Revolution of Great Britain. With an Appendix,
containing the report of the Committee of the Society; and Account of
the Population of France; and the Declarations of the Rights by the
National Assembly of France* (1789). This address to the
Revolution Society in commemoration of the events of 1688 partly
prompted Burke to compose his famous *Reflections on the
Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in
London Relative to that Event* (1790).



Burke's attack on Price in that work in turn led Wollstonecraft, egged
on by her publisher, Johnson, to take up her pen in the aged
Reverend's defence. *A Vindication of the Rights of Men* (1790)
was almost certainly the first of many responses Burke's
*Reflections* elicited*.* Initially published
anonymously at the end of November, the second edition that quickly
followed in mid-December bore its author's name and marked a turning
point in her career; it established her as a political writer. In
September 1791, Wollstonecraft began *A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects,* which
elaborated a number of points made in the previous
*Vindication*, namely, that in most cases, marriage was nothing
but a property relation, and that the education women received ensured
that they could not meet the expectations society had of them and
almost certainly guaranteed them an unhappy life.



Following the publication of her second *Vindication*,
Wollstonecraft was introduced to the French statesman and diplomat,
Charles Talleyrand, on his mission to London on the part of the
Constituent Assembly in February 1792. She dedicated the second
edition of the *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* to him.
In December 1792, she travelled to France where she met Gilbert Imlay,
an American merchant and author of *A Topographical Descriptions of
the Western Territory of North America* (1792) and *The
Emigrants* (1793). As British subjects were increasingly at risk
under the Terror, Wollstonecraft passed as Imlay's wife so as to
benefit from the security enjoyed at the time by American citizens.
They never married. Imlay was probably the source of Wollstonecraft's
greatest unhappiness, first through his lack of ardour for her, then
because of his infidelity, and finally because of his complete
rejection of her. Most of all, her love of Imlay brought
Wollstonecraft to the realisation that the passions are not so easily
brought to heel by reason.



Wollstonecraft had a girl by Imlay. She was born at Le Havre in May
1794 and named Fanny, after Wollstonecraft's friend, Fanny Blood. A
year after Fanny's birth, Wollstonecraft twice attempted suicide,
first in May, then in October 1795. She broke with Imlay finally in
March 1796. In April of the same year, she renewed her acquaintance
with William Godwin and they became lovers that summer. They were
married at St Pancras church in March 1797. On the 30th
August, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, future author of
*Frankenstein* and wife of Shelley, was born.


## 2. Pedagogical Writings



Apart from *Mary, a Fiction* and *The Cave of Fancy*
Wollstonecraft's early writings were of a pedagogical nature (Jones 2020). These
reveal the profound influence John Locke had on Wollstonecraft's
thought, and several of the arguments of his *Some Thoughts
Concerning Education* (1693) are echoed in Wollstonecraft's
conception of morality and the best manner to inculcate it in
individuals at the earliest possible age. The opening paragraph of her
*Thoughts on the Education of Daughters* speaks of the duty
parents have to ensure that 'reason should cultivate and govern
those instincts which are implanted in us to render the path of duty
pleasant--for if they are not governed they will run wild; and
strengthen the passions which are ever endeavouring to obtain
dominion--I mean vanity and self-love.' Similarly, the
beginning of her *Original Stories from Real Life* stated its
author's intent, namely to seek 'to cure those faults by reason,
which ought never to have taken root in the infant mind. Good habits,
imperceptibly fixed, are however far preferable to the precepts of reason; but
as this task requires more judgement than generally falls to the lot
of parents, substitutes must be sought for, and medicines given, when
regimen would have answered the purpose better'.
Wollstonecraft's prescriptions to counter the deplorable education she
thought her contemporaries were inflicting on their children takes the
form of a tale about two girls, Mary and Caroline. At the beginning of
the story, the reader finds the girls left to the management of
ignorant servants (one of Locke's great bugbears), but they are
eventually placed under the tuition of a woman of tenderness and
discernment. The book shows how the latter succeeds in teaching
contemptuous Mary and vain Caroline to avoid anger, exercise
compassion, love truth and virtue, and respect the whole of God's
creation. It is important to note however that whilst Locke advocated home education to shield boys from the bad influences to which they might be subject at school, Wollstonecraft was mostly inclined to think the opposite on the grounds that children needed to be with persons of their own age. In an ideal world, boys and girls would be educated together in schools. Many of these concerns would appear again in her *Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792): indeed Sandrine Berges reads this work primarily as a treatise on education (Berges 2013).



That reason must rule supreme could easily appear to be a running theme of Wollstonecraft's
works written prior to her sojourn in Revolutionary France and, all
the more, prior to her travels through Scandinavia. It is stressed in
her *Vindication of the Rights of Woman*. Other
continuities between her *Thoughts on the Education of
Daughters* and the *Vindication* include her insistence that girls and
young women be made to acquire 'inner resources' so as to
make them as psychologically independent as possible. The
*Thoughts* also reveals Wollstonecraft's conviction that
universal benevolence is the first virtue, as well as her faith in a
providentially ordained universe. She enjoined her readers to prepare
their children for 'the main business of our lives',
that is, the acquisition of virtue, and, unsurprisingly given her own
history, she urged parents to strengthen their children's characters
so as to enhance their capacity to survive personal tragedies.
Self-mastery was thus the aim of education and it was the duty of
parents to ensure that their children received it. However, she insisted that there was a time for everything, including for the development of each of the mind's faculties, not least the imagination. Ultimately, she wanted children and young people to educated in such a way as to have well balanced minds in strong and healthy bodies. That mind and body
needed to be exercised and prepared to face the inevitable hardships of life is
the fundamental point of her of her pedagogical works (Tomaselli 2020).


## 3. Moral and Political Writings



When Wollstonecraft began to engage in political commentary in
reviewing Price's *A Discourse on the Love of our Country*, she
praised him for his account of true patriotism as 'the result of
reason, not the undirected impulse of nature, ever tending to selfish
extremes' as well as his defence of Christianity's prescription
of universal benevolence against those who argued that such sentiments were
incompatible with the love of one's country. She endorsed his view of
liberty of conscience as a sacred right and wrote sympathetically
about his plea for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which
imposed civil disabilities on Dissenters. She also seemed to support
his claim that the political Settlement of 1689 was wanting in that it
did not make for full representation of the people and hence made only
for partial liberty. Finally, Wollstonecraft reproduced the passage in
which Price linked the American and French revolutions and clamoured
for the end of despotism throughout Europe.



When not so long thereafter she came to write her *Vindication of
the Rights of Men* (1790), Wollstonecraft attacked Edmund Burke
for having set upon an harmless elderly preacher in his
*Reflections*; yet her own review justifies Burke's depiction
of Price's sermon as inflammatory. Far from thinking that the events
taking place in France gave grounds for rejoicing, Burke feared their
consequences from the very start. The National Assembly's confiscation
of the Church's property, he predicted, would lead to further
confiscations, undermine the fundamental right to property, and result
in anarchy, which only the rise of a charismatic, authoritarian figure could bring to
an end.



Of the disagreements between Price and Wollstonecraft, on the one
hand, and Burke, on the other, one of the deepest was over their
respective view of the nature of civil society and of political power
in general. The two friends believed that government, the rule of law,
and all human relations could be simplified, explicated, and rendered
transparent, and both were convinced that this was the task ahead for
all lovers of liberty. For Burke, on the contrary, civil society
consisted of countless ineffable links between individuals. The
latter's relationship to authority was for the most part no less
ineffable; moreover, he believed sound political judgement to be the
product of experience, and he cautioned prudence. To sweep away
established practices and institutions and think of politics as a mere
matter of administrating in accordance with a set of abstract rules or
rights uninformed by the customs and culture, and hence the national
character, of a people was, in his view, to demonstrate a crass
disregard for the most obvious facts of human nature and history (Conniff 1999).
Burke's argument led him to dwell on France's financial position in
some detail, and he defended its royal family and its Church; he
insisted, moreover, that it was already benefiting from a policy of
gradual reform. The overall effect Burke sought to achieve was to depict
his opponent as theoretically confused, politically naive, generally
misinformed; and to show, most damnably of all, that Price's sermon on the *Love of
our Country*, with all its affirmation of feelings for humanity,
proved him to be unpatriotic.



Wollstonecraft's *Vindication* was the first of many replies.
Amongst those that followed was one by Catharine Macaulay, who had
influenced Wollstonecraft's pedagogy and was much admired by her (Gunther-Canada 1998; Coffee, 2019). Wollstonecraft's riposte is an interesting and rhetorically powerful
work in its own right as well as a necessary introduction to the
*Vindication of the Rights of Woman*. It consists mostly of a
sustained attack on Burke rather than a defence of the rights of man.
This is partly because Wollstonecraft took for granted a Lockean
conception of God-given rights discoverable by reason, except when the
latter was warped by self-love. Wollstonecraft further believed that
God made all things right and that the cause of all evil was man. In
her view, Burke's *Reflections* showed its author to be blind
to man-made poverty and injustice; this she attributed to his
infatuation with rank, Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the English
Constitution. Demonstrating her familiarity with Burke's other works
and speeches, especially *A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful* (1757) and the
*Speech on Conciliation with America* (1775), she also argued
that he was inconsistent, if only because of the impossibility, as she
saw it, of reconciling his sympathy for the American cause with his
reaction to events in France. In this, Wollstonecraft was far from
alone and many who had followed Burke's parliamentary career and heard
his Speeches to the House of Commons were astonished by what they
thought was a radical and inexplicable change of position.



As she was to do in her next and more famous *Vindication*,
Wollstonecraft did not simply clamour for rights, but emphasised that
these entail duties; but she also insisted that none could be expected
to perform duties whose natural rights were not respected. Furthermore
she used David Hume's *History of England* (1754-62) to
contend that England's laws were the product of historical contingency
and insisted that only those institutions that could withstand the
scrutiny of reason and be shown to be in conformity with natural
rights and God's justice merited respect and obedience. There was no
question of blanket reverence for the past and its juridical legacy.
As for civilization, she thought its progress very uneven and
dismissed the culture of politeness and polish as nothing but a screen
behind which hypocrisy, egotism and greed festered unchecked. Finally,
opposing nature and reason to artifice and politeness, she made
herself the true patriot and Burke the fickle Francophile. She was the
clear-headed independent thinker, he the emotive creature of a system
of patronage. She exhibited manly virtues, he effeminacy; although Mary Fairclough argues that, in truth, there was much in common between each thinker's treatment of feelings and instincts (Fairclough 2020).



In the midst of her tirade she turned, rather unexpectedly, to the
subject of family life and the limits of parental authority,
especially in relation to arranged marriages (Tomaselli 2001). She condemned marriages
of convenience together with late marriages: both fostered immorality
in her view. Indeed, from her perspective, nearly every aspect of the
prevailing culture had that consequence, for, in bringing girls up to
be nothing but empty headed playthings, parents made for a morally
bankrupt society. Such beings could never make dutiful mothers, as
they took the horizon to be the eyes of the men they flirted with. The
moral depravity of a society devoted to the acquisition of property
and its conspicuous display rather than to the pursuit of reason and
the protection of natural rights found the means of its reproduction
in the family, she contended. Here her dispute was not just with
Burke, but implicitly also with Price (Jones, 2005). In his sermon, he had deplored
the sexual depravity of the times that he saw embodied even in those
he considered patriots. But to seek only to vindicate the rights of
men, as Price had done, was insufficient and misconceived, according
to Wollstonecraft. If one sought a truly moral society, the family had
to change, and this, in turn, required a complete transformation in the
nature of the relationship between men and women before, and within,
marriage (Botting 2006). Only a sound upbringing of both the sexes could secure that.
This was the nub of her attack on political theorists and
educationalists alike.



When Wollstonecraft came to write *The Vindication of the Rights of
Woman*, which she did within a matter of months following the
publication of her first overtly political work, the moral
rejuvenation of society and the happiness of individual women were
woven together. Women were ill-prepared for their duties as social
beings and imprisoned in a web of false expectations that would
inevitably make them miserable. She wanted women to become
rational and independent beings whose sense of worth came, not
from their appearance, but from their inner perception of self-command
and knowledge. Women had to be educated; their minds and bodies had to
be trained. This would make them good companions, wives, mothers and
citizens (Brace 2000). Above all it would make them fully human, that is, beings
ruled by reason and characterised by self-command. Besides criticisms
of existing pedagogical practices and theories, most notably
Rousseau's *Emile* (1762), the *Vindication* contains
many social and political proposals which range from a detailed
outline of necessary changes in school curriculum to the suggestion
that women be granted not only civil and political rights, but have
elected representatives of their own. It argues that women should be
taught skills so as to be able to support themselves and their
children in widowhood, and never have to marry or remarry out of
financial necessity. It seeks to reclaim midwifery for women, against
the encroachment of men into this profession, and contends that women
could be physicians just as well as nurses. It urges women to extend
their interests to encompass politics and the concerns of the whole of
humanity. It also contains advice on how to make marriages last. In
Wollstonecraft's view, marriages ought to have friendship rather than
physical attraction as their basis (Kendrick 2019). Husbands and wives ought not,
moreover, to be overly intimate and should maintain a degree of
reserve towards each other. This said, she thought sex should be based on genuine mutual physical desire.



Wollstonecraft wanted women to aspire to full citizenship, to be
worthy of it, and this necessitated the development of reason.
Rational women would perceive their real duties. They would forgo the
world of mere appearances, the world of insatiable needs on which
eighteenth-century society was based, as Adam Smith had explained more
lucidly than anyone, and of which France was the embodiment, in
Wollstonecraft's conception (Leddy 2016).



That she embraced the social and economic consequences of her vision
of happy marriages, based on friendship and producing the next moral
generation was spelled out further in her subsequent work, *An
Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French
Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe* (1794). In
that work, she endeavoured, amongst other things, to assess the merits
and demerits of the progress of humanity and establish the causes of
French despotism. The picture she drew of *ancien*
*regime* France was of a country ruled by superstition,
and morally and politically degenerate. Borrowing from Smith, whose
*Theory of Moral Sentiments* (1759) and *Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations* (1776) she had drawn
on previously, she sketched a possible future society in which the
division of labour would be kept to a minimum and the sexes would be
not only educated together but encouraged to work in family units.
Single sex institutions and, for instance, all-male workshops
encouraged lasciviousness in her view. She thus looked forward to a
society in which small businesses and farms would provide basic,
instead of superfluous, needs.



The combination of her experience of her unrequited love for
Imlay, the dictates of her own emotions, and the tribulations of a
trip in Northern Europe led her to reconsider her view of the power of reason.
Indeed, she was also to review her opinion of France, polite culture and
manners, even Catholicism which she had abhorred, a loathing that her
stay in Portugal had done much to strengthen. The *Letters Written
During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark* (1796),
whose influence on travel literature as well as the Romantic movement
is by no means negligible, show Wollstonecraft to have begun to
espouse an increasingly nuanced view of the world, and to have sought to
develop an even more fluid account of the relationship between reason, the imagination, and the
passions, as well as of modernity. Thus she grew a little closer to
Burke in that she came to think that the tyranny of commercial wealth
might be worse than that of rank and privilege. Whilst in France, she
had already begun to write less critically of the English system of
government. She had witnessed the Terror, fallen in love, born a child
out of wedlock, been rejected, and attempted suicide. A second suicide
attempt lay ahead. So did the prospect of happiness with William
Godwin, a prospect cut short by her death in childbirth. Posthumous
notoriety was to follow as Wollstonecraft became identified only with
the *Vindication of the Rights of Woman* and that work was
ironically, in turn, equated with a flouting of social conventions,
principally in relation to marriage.


## 4. Reputation



Although she was very much encouraged by her publisher, Joseph
Johnson, she received little support from fellow intellectuals in her
lifetime. Even Godwin did not take to her on their first meeting. Relatively few of the foremost women writers gave Wollstonecraft their
wholehearted support in the eighteenth century. She received some encouragement for her first publications from Catharine Macaulay, but the latter unfortunately died in 1791, before Wollstonecraft's career reached its peak. Some mocked her, but rarely were her ideas genuinely assessed in the way they have come to be since the second half of the twentieth century. The
leading poet, Anna Barbauld (1743-1825) was one of the few members of the radical intelligentsia of the time whose opposition to Wollstonecraft was the product of a real engagement with her views on women. By the end of the 1790s and for most of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft was derided by many, if only because of what was deemed to have been a scandalous personal life. There were, to be sure, important exceptions, especially in America (Botting and Carey 2004). But such praise as she did receive on both sides of the Atlantic came from arguably limited acquaintance with her ideas or her intellectual persona.



Thus it seemed that from the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the
next, she, who had endeavoured to place marriage on a solid foundation
by providing an account of the education that would prepare spouses
for it, would be thought of as someone who had sought to pass
as married when she wasn't and as the mother of an illegitimate child.
Much of this reputation was owed to Godwin's frank, arguably
unnecessarily frank, account of Wollstonecraft's life, in *Memoirs
of the Author of a 'Vindication of the Rights of
Woman'* (1798). It revealed, amongst other personal details,
her relationship with Imlay and thereby cast a deep shadow over her
reputation. In any event, John Stuart Mill's *Subjection of
Women* (1869) was to eclipse most other contributions to feminist
debates of the period.



In the twentieth century, and especially following the growth of
feminism in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1960s, scholars disregarded
the vicissitudes of Wollstonecraft's private life and heralded her as
the first English feminist. She came to be read principally within the
context of the history of the women's movement. Since the last decades
of the twentieth century, however, a growing number of commentators
have looked at *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* in its
historical and intellectual context rather than in isolation or in
relation to subsequent feminist theories. This has led to renewed
interest in her other political writings, including her *Letters
Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark*.
Wollstonecraft has now long ceased to be seen as just a scandalous
literary figure, or just the embodiment of a nascent feminism which
only reached maturity two hundred years later, but as an Enlightenment
moral and political thinker whose works present a self-contained
argument about the kind of change society would need to undergo for
men and women to be virtuous in both the private and the public sphere
and thereby secure the chance of a measure of happiness.



What is more, with growing interest in reception history, the extent
of her influence in Europe and beyond as been the subject of
reassessments. It is becoming increasingly evident that
Wollstonecraft was widely read and respected as a pioneer of woman's
rights around the world, especially in America, continental Europe, and Brazil (Botting 2013). She was translated into several languages, in the 1790s and throughout the nineteenth century (Johns 2020).



Efforts to place Wollstonecraft's thought within an international, and specifically an imperial, context have focused on her use of abolitionist discourses, or what Laura Brace (2016) calls the 'social imaginary' of anti-slavery, to criticize British society. Moira Ferguson (1994) places Wollstonecraft in dialogue with nineteenth-century representations of sexual exploitation within the colonial context by such women authors as Jane Austen and Jamaica Kincaid.



Wollstonecraft's reference to slavery and the slave trade as "an atrocious
insult to humanity" in *Vindication of the Rights of
Men*, and her call for social justice more generally, has been
noted by Amartya Sen in his *The Idea of Justice* (2009). Often
seen as a proponent of liberal values (Sapiro 1992), Wollstonecraft
continues also to placed within a republican tradition, most recently
by Sandrine Berges (2013), Alan Coffee (2014), and Lena Halldenius
(2015), who have analysed her view of freedom in terms of independence
and the absence of subordination to the arbitrary power of others.



In recent years, scholars have also made use of Wollstonecraft to inform modern feminist discussions, especially those regarding autonomy, education, and nature. Catriona Mackenzie (2016) argues that Wollstonecraft's understanding of freedom as independence is a forebear to feminist theories that emphasise female autonomy. Sandrine Berges has compared Wollstonecraft's model of education to modern 'capabilities' approaches that favour grassroots educational programmes. Barbara Seeber (2016) places Wollstonecraft within the tradition of ecofeminism: she argues that Wollstonecraft linked social hierarchies with the domination of nature by human beings. Sandrine Berges (2016) identifies a contradiction in her position on feminist motherhood that remains relevant for feminism today.



Twenty-first century studies have displayed new interest in the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Wollstonecraft's work. Isabelle Bour (2019) has charted her engagement with competing epistemological models in the 1790s, while Sylvana Tomaselli (2016; 2019) asserts that Wollstonecraft engaged closely with the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, as well as Plato's theory of knowledge, Emily Dumler-Winckler (2019) argues that Wollstonecraft appropriated and sometimes subverted a set of conceptual tools from theology in order to make her arguments for women's equality. Wollstonecraft's complex relationship with the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been investigated by Christopher Brooke (2019).



Whether Wollstonecraft is best seen as belonging to one tradition or
any other will remain a matter of dispute. What is important to
remember is that she responded to a fast changing political situation
and that she continued to engage critically with public opinion, the
leading intellectual and political figures of her age, and most
remarkably, her own views in the light of her experiences in France,
Northern Europe and Great Britain. Her critique of Burke, the English
political system, even the aristocracy, became more muted as she found
the continued expansion of commerce and growth of the luxury economy
to lead to even greater inequities than the world it was
replacing.