Amazon.com Review
The founding mother of feminism comes across as vividly as the heroine of a romantic novel in this fascinating biography, which quotes extensively from Wollstonecraft's correspondence to evoke her high-strung personality. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) gained an early horror of traditional marriage from observing the relationship of her despotic father and submissive mother. There were no accepted outlets for her energy and ambition in 18th-century England; not until she moved to London in 1788 and became "the first of a new genus," a professional woman writer, did Wollstonecraft come into her own as a member of a circle of radical intellectuals.
A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, made her famous, but she remained needy, self-absorbed, and self-dramatizing. "She could not bring herself to use the rational language of
The Rights of Women on herself," writes British scholar Janet Todd. "Her own life was always delivered in the language of sensibility." Todd capably summarizes Wollstonecraft's writings and gives detailed accounts of her most important relationships: her stormy bond with her sisters; an intense teenage friendship with Fanny Blood, who later died in her arms after childbirth; the unhappy love affair with American Gilbert Imlay, father of her first child, whose infidelity prompted her suicide attempt; and an emotionally tumultuous but happy marriage to philosopher William Godwin. Modern feminists reading this unvarnished account may wish Wollstonecraft weren't quite so neurotic, but Todd must be admired for refusing to tidy up her subject's messy personality.
--Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
Mary Wollstonecraft may be called "the mother of feminism," but motherhood in all its various aspects represented little but trouble to her. All her life, according to Todd (Aphra Behn), she resented her own mother because she had breast-fed only her brother, leaving Mary to the wet nurse, and because she detested the model of long-suffering patience in the face of paternal tyranny that was her mother's accommodation to marriage. Later, Mary would intervene energetically following the birth of her sister's child, encouraging Eliza to run away from husband and baby to pursue an independent female existence, although Eliza proved to be woefully inadequate at it. Mary's own first-born was the result of a passionate and illicit affair with an American, Gilbert Imlay, who dumped her when the baby was less than a year old. Finally, and tragically, Mary herself died at 38, after giving birth to a second daughter, another Mary, who would grow up to write that classic of grotesque creation, Frankenstein. Despite, or perhaps because of, the burden of her gender, and despite her poverty, frequent depressions and occasional suicidal moments, Wollstonecraft's achievement was astounding: several novels; many essays, reviews and books of advice; and, notably, The Vindication of the Rights of Women, a fundamental feminist document. By Todd's account, Wollstonecraft could be prickly, sometimes needy, often arrogant and wrong-headed. Todd brings her back to life in all her splendid contradictions, without condescension, idealization or, happily, without recourse to intrusive psychologizing.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
