Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Wollstonecraft
-
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.
It is odd that although she lived in London when Wollstonecraft
published her Vindication, AJ
left no recorded comment on the issue of women's rights. This may be because surviving excerpts from her correspondence...
Reception
Ann Jebb
George Dyer
warmly praised AJ
in his poem On Liberty, which appeared in his Poems of 1792. Since he also praised Wollstonecraft
's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Charlotte Smith
,...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Jellicoe
With this play, Jellicoe deliberately broke with her earlier work by writing a narrative drama based on a pre-existing story. She was attracted to the subject of Percy Shelley's life
because it gave her the...
Textual Production
Maria Jane Jewsbury
After MJJ
's death, Anne Katharine Elwood
reported at second hand a story that Jewsbury intended to update and recast Mary Wollstonecraft
's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she thought could...
Wilkes, Joanne. “’Only the broken music’? The Critical Writings of Maria Jane Jewsbury”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 1, pp. 105-18.
115
Author summary
Samuel Johnson
Arriving in eighteenth-century London as one more young literary hopeful from the provinces, SJ
achieved such a name for himself as an arbiter of poetry, of morality (through his Rambler and other periodical essays and...
Friends, Associates
Samuel Johnson
Boswell's is Johnson's most famous friendship, but his women friends were immensely important to him. Carter and Lennox were joined by Hester Thrale
(though Johnson always reckoned her husband, Henry Thrale
, if anything the...
Textual Features
Samuel Johnson
Misella (one of many women whose struggles are foregrounded in the Rambler though the medium of fictitious female correspondents) was first seduced by a man she trusted, and has since known the depths of poverty...
Publishing
Samuel Johnson
The work was translated into Spanish by Inés Joyes y Blake
as El principe de Abisinia and published at Madrid by 25 May 1798, bound together with Blake's proto-feminist, Wollstonecraft
-influenced tract, the Apologia de...
Textual Features
Sophia King
This novel about the genesis of evil is told in the first person by its wicked yet pitiable male narrator, presented as a man of strong intellect and strong feeling, whose first words are What...
Textual Features
Julia Kristeva
JK
's essay distinguishes three phases or generations in feminism. The first phase (whose opening can be dated from Wollstonecraft
or from another pioneering feminist text) is associated with linear time and with agitation for...
politics
Lady Caroline Lamb
Like her birth family, LCL
strongly supported a Whig and reformist political agenda.
Douglass, Paul. Lady Caroline Lamb. Palgrave Macmillan.
85
She told her cousin Lord Hartington
, I have read Mary WollstonecraftRights of Woman, am become a convert.
Douglass, Paul. Lady Caroline Lamb. Palgrave Macmillan.
86
She also...
Textual Features
Anna Margaretta Larpent
This later diary, generally written daily at any odd moment, provides indexing of special events which reveals AML
's methodical character. Occasional months are missing here and there. The diarist offers penetrating comment on a...
Family and Intimate relationships
Harriet Lee
HL
turned down a marriage proposal from William Godwin
, recent widower of Mary Wollstonecraft
.
Lee, Sophia. “Introduction”. The Recess, edited by April Alliston, University Press of Kentucky, p. ix - lii.
xxxiv
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sophia Lee
The preface to this book, newly written for its publication, is SL
's major critical statement about the woman's literary tradition and her own place in it. She mentions the hostile reception of her own...
