Women's Biography, Labor Leaders, Activists, & Social Reformers, British & Irish Literary Biography, Literary Figures - Women's Biography, Women's Biography
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Overview
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the founder of modern feminism-in her time, the most famous woman in Europe and America. In this exciting new biography, Lyndall Gordon proposes that at each stage of a passionate and courageous life-as teacher, writer, lover, and traveler-Mary Wollstonecraft was an original. She had advanced ideas on education, and her views on single motherhood, family responsibilities, working life, domestic affections, friendships, and sexual relationships now look astonishingly modern. She tested new ways a man and a woman might come to know each other and live together. "Imagination must lead the senses, not the senses the imagination," she told her American lover, Gilbert Imlay, and repeated to her husband, William Godwin.Vindication is the first biography to show this remarkable woman at full strength and bring out the range as well as the reverberations of her genius in the following and subsequent generations. Here is the drama of Wollstonecraft's life as a governess in an aristocratic family in Ireland, as an independent writer in London, as an on-the-scene observer of the French Revolution, and as a daring traveler to Scandinavia on the trail of an unsolved crime. Although she died young, her spirit and unconventional ideas lived on in the lives of her daughter, Mary Shelley, and three other heirs who had to contend with a counterrevolutionary age. Vindication offers new evidence for the influence of early American political thought in England and demonstrates for the first time the profound effect of Mary Wollstonecraft's own writing, especially her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, on American figures of the day, among them John and Abigail Adams. This groundbreaking biography follows the colorful wheelings and dealings of young American adventurers like Joel Barlow and the elusive frontiersman Imlay, who sought their fortunes amid the tumultuous events of late-eighteenth-century Europe and whose clandestine service to the fledgling American government is newly explored.
This is a brilliantly told story, moving on from the issue of rights to larger questions that still lie beyond us: What is woman's nature? What will she contribute to civilization? Lyndall Gordon mounts a spirited defense of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose previous biographers have often doubted her integrity, her stability, and the exhilarating experiment that was her life. Vindication probes these doubts, measures Wollstonecraft's life against her own strengths instead of the weakness that sometimes held her back, and reinterprets her for the twenty-first century.
Editorials
Toni Bentley
In her wonderful, and deeply sobering, new book, Lyndall Gordon, the distinguished biographer of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Henry James, tackles this formidable woman with grace, clarity and much new research. Despite occasional slips into strangely purple prose (when she reproaches her lover, ''retorts -- great sprays of indignant eloquence -- would fountain from her opening throat''), Gordon relates Wollstonecraft's story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified.— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
With Gordon, the life of the "famous, then notorious" Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) is in the hands of a scholarly admirer and defender, a distinguished biographer (of T. S. Eliot, Charlotte Bront and others) as interested in Wollstonecraft for her mistakes as for her triumphs. For those familiar with the broad outlines of Wollstonecraft's personal life (her friendships with Jane Arden and Fanny Blood, her relationship with the painter Fuseli, her affair with Gilbert Imlay, her "friendship melting into love" with the philosopher Godwin), Gordon offers fresh detail and insight. She brings encyclopedic scope to her construction of a very British life deeply affected by tumultuous events in America and France. "She was not a born genius," Gordon says, "she became one," and Gordon succeeds admirably in showing readers how this independent, compassionate woman who devised a blueprint for human change achieved that distinction. Wollstonecraft's wide, evolving circles of friends, benefactors, mentors, admirers and detractors is richly sketched. Melodrama (a money-squandering, abusive father; a sister trapped in a tyrannical marriage; financial crises; unfaithful lovers; attempted suicides) abounds. Wollstonecraft's life was an adventurous one; in Paris, she watched as the admired French Revolution become the Reign of Terror. Yet Wollstonecraft's adventurous life illuminates rather than obscures the philosophical and historical work that made her the foremother of much modern thinking about education and human rights, as well as about women's rights, female sexuality and the institution of marriage. Deeply documented with Wollstonecraft's writing, contemporary memoirs, letters and archival materials, Gordon's biography is eminently readable and rewarding. Photos. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (May 3) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
This biography of the Englishwoman many consider the mother of modern feminism is rich with new interpretations, sources, and detail. Independent scholar Gordon, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life, captures the drama of Wollstonecraft's life, from her difficult childhood to her struggle to support herself as a writer, her ill-fated romance with American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, the birth of her first daughter, her marriage to writer William Godwin, and her death following the birth of her second daughter, Mary. Wollstonecraft's farsighted philosophies of education, human rights, and liberty unfold not only within the context of her private travails but also against the backdrop of history as we walk with her, for example, through the bloody streets of Paris during the revolution. Newly exploited sources-e.g., notes that John Adams scribbled in the margins of his copy of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman-suggest her broad influence in both Europe and America. This biography joins recent works like Janet Todd's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life and Caroline Franklin's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life as the new standards for Wollstonecraft scholarship. Appropriate for academic libraries; essential for women's studies collections.-Linda V. Carlisle, Southern Illinois Univ., Edwardsville Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
A serious reconsideration of the short, passionate life of the 18th-century protofeminist, by accomplished English biographer Gordon (Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James and T.S. Eliot). Gordon sets out to readjust the record of the crusading intellectual and feminist's life after its skewing by the odium attached to her unmarried affairs and out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Wollstonecraft's story was largely defined by the straitened circumstances her profligate, idle father left the family in, squandering his inherited wealth and moving every few years; the eldest daughter would witness horrific scenes of domestic violence in an age when women were chattel of their husbands, and she would even secretly orchestrate the rescue of her younger sister, Bess, from an abusive marriage. She gained an education by the "school of adversity," working as a governess and schoolteacher, then determinedly establishing herself in London to make a living by her pen. Within the community of male writers who clustered around the print shop of Joseph Johnson, Wollstonecraft absorbed the radical ideas of the day-support for the American Revolution, abolition of slavery, liberal methods of teaching, enlightened sexuality, the French Revolution and women's rights. Her groundbreaking Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) made her instantly famous, reminding the revolutionary leaders in no uncertain terms that women should be included in the public debate. Gordon moves bravely through the electrifying ideas of the era and tracks Wollstonecraft's desperate love affair with the oily American frontiersmen Gilbert Imlay, who probably saved her life during the Terror in Paris, as well as her reputation.Gordon devotes two chapters to posthumous mythmaking by Wollstonecraft's husband of five months, William Godwin, whose vehement biography of his 38-year-old wife (dead after giving birth to her second daughter) painted her as "a female Werther, suicidal, doomed." Overall, Gordon is more concerned with ideas, and does not infuse her subject with the life force of similar schoolmistress-spinster-autodidact Elizabeth Peabody in the recent Peabody Sisters (p. 214). Nonetheless, an outstanding, rigorously researched intellectual biography.John Leonard
"Fierce and wonderful. . . . [Wollstonecraft is] a dazzling character on the brilliant page."New York Sun
"[Wollstonecraft’s] aspirations to greatness...keep breaking through Ms. Gordon’s wonderfully wrought book like flashes of lightning."Bust Magazine
"Gordon vindicates this once-vilified ‘hyena in petticoats’ as a melancholy, complex, heroic feminist, stunningly ahead of her time."Richmond Times-Dispatch
"A sobering and inspirational read for women today. Readers who delve into it will meet a brave, visionary woman."New York Review of Books
"Imaginative and intelligent, consistently absorbing... [Gordon] speculates and probes with a freewheeling intelligence that responds to Wollstonecraft’s own."New York Times Book Review
"Gordon relates Wollstonecraft’s story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified...Wonderful, and deeply sobering."Newsday
"Exceptional, emotionally overwhelming . . . A 360-degree exploration of Wollstonecraft in her era—and beyond."The Independent
"Judicious, sympathetic, intelligent and utterly riveting . . . Gordon rescues Wollstonecraft from both reactionary disdain and soft-focus feminist sentiment."Book Details
Published
May 1, 2005
Publisher
New York : HarperCollins, c2005.
Pages
576
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780060198022