Mary Wollstonecraft

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Standard Name: Wollstonecraft, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Wollstonecraft
Married Name: Mary Godwin
Pseudonym: Mr Cresswick, Teacher of Elocution
Pseudonym: M.
Pseudonym: W.
MW has a distinguished historical place as a feminist: as theorist, critic and reviewer, novelist, and especially as an activist for improving women's place in society. She also produced pedagogy or conduct writing, an anthology, translation, history, analysis of politics as well as gender politics, and a Romantic account of her travels in Scandinavia.

Connections

Connections Author name Sort descending Excerpt
Education Louisa May Alcott
She was also a great self-educator and took to reading everything from Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress to Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter (he was a family friend). She particularly admired Mary Wollstonecraft and also warmed...
Family and Intimate relationships W. H. Auden
Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University formerly maintained on his website at http://www.stanford.edu/~njenkins/ a section called W. H. Auden. Family Ghosts, designed to show how Auden's family, despite his claims to ordinariness, sprang from a...
Characters Joanna Baillie
Countess Albini in Count Basil is a heroine in the same mould as Jane De Monfort: critic Anne Mellor calls her not only the embodiment of rational judgement but also Baillie's homage to Mary Wollstonecraft
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Clara Balfour
In her general overview of the history of English literature during these centuries, she focuses especially on English poets because as she says, great poets not only give form, power and beauty to a nation's...
Textual Features Isabella Banks
The Neglected Wife describes a husband neglectful of his promise to cherish his wife and guard her from blighting care, or undermining grief,
Banks, Isabella, and George Linnaeus Banks. Daisies in the Grass. R. Hardwicke.
118
but who, on the contrary, has many extramarital affairs. Like Mary Wollstonecraft
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
The importance of politics in ALB 's journalism is shown by her declining an invitation from Maria Edgeworth in 1804 to associate herself with a journal written entirely by women, on the grounds that the...
Publishing Anna Letitia Barbauld
Barbauld probably wrote two anonymous articles on the recently-dead Mary Wollstonecraft in the Monthly Visitor, 1798.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
J. W. Croker 's notice in the Quarterly Review (in June 1812, wrongly attributed by some to Southey ) was most offensive of all. He reached for the gendered weapons so often drawn against Mary Wollstonecraft
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
An unacknowledged example was Wollstonecraft 's The Female Reader. The project of rivalling Enfield was ambitious; furthermore, the association of women with public speaking was subversive. He had included only one woman (herself) among...
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB 's early fame is exemplified in the project of a well-known London printer (reported in January 1787) for a series of plates illustrating works by the most celebrated British Poets. His list began with...
Friends, Associates Anna Letitia Barbauld
Her close friends at this period included Mary and Joseph Priestley and a number of young women of her own age. She was particularly attracted by a pair of sisters who got themselves barred from...
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
Literary admirers of the hymns included Hannah More , Anna Seward , and Elizabeth Carter , who found some passages amazingly sublime.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
193
The innumerable children who loved and later remembered them included Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Letitia Barbauld
Some of Barbauld's acutest social comment was linked with her pedagogy. Fashion, a Vision, probably written about 1792 for her first private paying pupil, and picking up some ideas from Wollstonecraft 's Vindication,...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Letitia Barbauld
This work was controversial. William Enfield in the Monthly Review praised it and endorsed its opinions.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
162-3
Mary Wollstonecraft quoted from Barbauld's Thoughts on the Devotional Taste in her own preface to The Female Reader...
Textual Features Anna Letitia Barbauld
She strikes a newly bold, almost an insurrectionary note here, calling upon revolutionary France, indeed, to provide a model. [W]hatever is corrupted must be lopt away, she writes, as people assert their long forgotten...

Timeline

December 1765: In the parish of St Botolph without Bishopsgate,...

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December 1765

In the parish of St Botolph without Bishopsgate, London, a parish council meeting heard several Disputes whether women householders who paid the poor rate had a Right to Vote for Parish Officers.

1782: Gilbert's Act stated that only the disabled...

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1782

Gilbert's Act stated that only the disabled should receive poor relief in workhouses; the able-bodied were to find work outside, or be provided with outdoor relief if there was no work.

After 1 February 1785: M. Peddle (a gifted, little-known, Evangelical...

Women writers item

After 1 February 1785

M. Peddle (a gifted, little-known, Evangelical woman of Yeovil in Somerset, who later issued a conduct book under the name of Cornelia) published a biblical paraphrase in novelistic style: The Life of Jacob.

May 1788: The Analytical Review: or history of literature...

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May 1788

The Analytical Review: or history of literature domestic and foreign began publication, edited by Thomas Christie and published by Joseph Johnson .

March 1791-March 1796: The Bon Ton Magazine, or, Microscope of Fashion...

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March 1791-March 1796

The Bon Ton Magazine, or, Microscope of Fashion and Folly set out to chart the sex scandals of the day, with close attention to court cases, gossip, and the implications for social class.

1797: Thomas Gisborne's Enquiry into the Duties...

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1797

Thomas Gisborne 's Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (a reaction to the writings of radicals like Wollstonecraft ) was published.

1798: Richard Polwhele published The Unsex'd Females,...

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1798

Richard Polwhele published The Unsex'd Females, his notorious attack on Wollstonecraft and other active radicals.

April 1798: With debating clubs under threat from British...

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April 1798

With debating clubs under threat from British government repression, and the brief era of women's debating clubs over, one club debated the topic of women's writing versus women's domesticity.

2 July 1798: The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum: or...

Writing climate item

2 July 1798

The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum: or polite repository of amusement and instruction published its first number. Sometimes called The Ladies' Monthly Museum . . . it ran until the 1830s.

9 July 1798: George Canning, writing in the Anti-Jacobin,...

Women writers item

9 July 1798

George Canning , writing in the Anti-Jacobin, lambasted sensibility as a literary mode stemming from France, from Rousseau , and from diseased fancy, effeminacy, and self-obsession.

1805: George Nicholson compiled and published at...

Women writers item

1805

George Nicholson compiled and published at Poughnill near Ludlow in ShropshireThe Advocate and Friend of Woman, an anthology of excerpts.

Between 1881 and 1886: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,...

Writing climate item

Between 1881 and 1886

Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Susan B. Anthony , and Matilda Joslyn Gage published the first three volumes of their History of Woman Suffrage. They dedicated the first volume to the memory of Mary Wollstonecraft .

9 July 1885: Karl Pearson (then a solemn, rationalist...

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9 July 1885

Karl Pearson (then a solemn, rationalist young barrister) held the first meeting of a society designed to talk about sex in a spirit of high seriousness and sense of intellectual adventure:
Walkowitz, Judith R. “Science, Feminism and Romance: The Men and Women’s Club 1885-1889”. History Workshop Journal, Vol.
21
, No. 1, pp. 36-59.
37
the Men and Women's Club

1895: Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published...

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1895

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published their influential Studies on Hysteria, a foundational text for psychoanalysis.

Texts

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Joseph Johnson, 1790.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Joseph Johnson, 1792.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Editor Poston, Carol H., Norton, 1988.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editor Wardle, Ralph M., Cornell University Press, 1979.
Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf. Elements of Morality. Translator Wollstonecraft, Mary, Joseph Johnson, 1790.
Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, and Mary Wollstonecraft. “Introduction”. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, New Edition, T. F. Unwin, 1891.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. “Introduction”. Mary; and, The Wrongs of Woman, edited by Gary Kelly, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. vii - xxviii.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Joseph Johnson, 1796.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Editors Mee, Jon and Tone Brekke, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary: A Fiction. Joseph Johnson, 1788.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary; and, The Wrongs of Woman. Editor Kelly, Gary, Oxford University Press, 1980.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. Joseph Johnson, 1794.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Original Stories from Real Life. Joseph Johnson, 1788.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Posthumous Works. Editor Godwin, William, Joseph Johnson, 1798.
Wollstonecraft, Mary, editor. The Female Reader. Joseph Johnson, 1789.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editors Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, Pickering, 1989.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. “The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria. A Fragment”. Posthumous Works, edited by William Godwin, Joseph Johnson, 1798, p. Vols. I - II.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Joseph Johnson, 1787.