Customer Reviews

Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lyndall Gordon's marvellous, insightful biography presents the reader with a many-layered, intellectualy committed, morally-centered Wollstonecroft who triumphed over the stereotypes of her day -- albeit perhaps not over the prejudices of her early biographers -- by virtue of her originality, passion and resiliance. She depicts Wollstonecroft as a searcher and teacher who sought to define a role for women that included men and was founded on an appreciation of domesticity and motherhood and an abhorrance of violence. This Wollstonecroft experienced the French Revolution, not merely as an intellectual, but as a human being who was repelled by the violence and irrationality of the terror even as she became caught up in her own personal drama of romance, childbirth and rejection. Many writers, including those in her own time, depicted Wollstonecroft as an idealist whose practice fell short of her principles. Gordon illuminates those principles and shows that an appreciation of humanity, emotion and the importance of empathy was always central to Wollstonecroft's thought and that, if she fell short at times, she had the intelligence, determination and insight to recover. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this biography, including the sections describing Wollstonecroft's journey to Norway on behalf of Gilbert Imlay, a central event in Wollstonecroft's life that brought together many of the themes -- courage,devotion, originality, tenacity, the transformation of personal experience into art (her travel book) -- that resonate through Mary Wollstonecroft's life and define her legacy.

Take an avant-garde feminist, teacher, polemicist, child care advisor, grandmother - so to speak - of "Frankenstein", flouter of social convention, twice-failed suicidee, with wit worthy of a snooty Paris salon. Now make her tale as dry as the inventory in an annual audit. Can you do that? Lyndall Gordon can. Gordon shows all, but illuminates little. Her forte is detail with a whiff of sentiment, not the dance of ideas nor subtleties of context. MW clashed with Burke about the revolution in France, but that report passes quickly in favor of repetitious opinions about MW's sisters or students. We hear about MW's personal dread at dark prole forms outside her Paris home, but little about her reaction to the Jacobin silencing of French feminists. We wander on an agonizing search for a silver ship - it rivals Geraldo's opening of Al Capone's vault for its empty ending. Still, Gordon's inventory can please; suggesting enjoyable lines of inquiry for an engaged reader. With the growth of literacy, all of the worthies were publishing. Was MW the star of some 18th century proto-blogosphere? Why did such an independent woman (and fierce mother) throw herself into the Thames because of a man? What commends her to us still? Surely not just her willingness to face scandal openly, Paris Hilton with a tongue that stings. Other women taught or wrote; what energy of desire made MW sui generis? In the end, Gordon's book is accounting, good accounting - hard data to run down intriguing questions that Wollstonecraft's life proffers.

This book is not the place to begin if you are not already convinced of Mary Wollstonecraft's genius. I began reading to find the author referring to Wollstonecraft as a genius without any preface for this claim. I was immediately thrown out of the narrative by this assumption. The author describes each of the books that Wollstonecraft wrote without bothering to asses their merit for the reader, are we to take for granted that they were great literary works? I found this lack of any sort of judgment of the subject strange. The book similarly failed to engage me in the narrative. The author leaves her subject for long discussions of the history of the family that she was a governess for. This subject did not have enough baring on Wollstonecraft's life to make it worth including. That such a unique and groundbreaking woman should have her life reduced to so dull a narrative, with so many assumption about her life disappointed me. The book itself failed to hold my interest.

The truth is, none of the recent biographies are really satisfying. Claire Tomalin's is well known as inaccurate; Janet Todd's is unbelievably long and full of incredibly tedious discussions of Mary's dreary family; and Gordon's is really quite superficial -- and with weird opinions thrown in for good measure (9/11?).

None of these really grapples with Mary as a writer and thinker, which is -- apart from her "new genus" -- why she repays our interest today. In fact, when you look at her life (Todd is the best at this), you really see what a nasty person Mary was (with lots of reasons, given her upbringing); but her exasperating nastiness is really beside the point. Gordon's bio does come to life with the Mary/Godwin marriage -- but by then it is very late in the book. And then there is a huge digression into the future life of Margaret King (the result of the usual biographer's temptation to find something new to talk about).

We are still waiting for a good, balanced, biography of one of the most important women in history.

This is a beautifully written biography about a fascinating woman. While she was a serious thinker in advance of her times, her life was of the stuff that would make a good romantic novel. The backdrop is not only England and Ireland, but the French Revolution and includes the machinations of various representatives of the fledgling United States stationed in Europe. No less interesting are the chapters on the women who were her biologic and ideological heirs including her second daughter who married Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.

This beautiful and interesting biography tells the story of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) who can be considered by some to the founder of modern feminism. She is the writer of many books including Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Travels, her journal of the time she spend traveling the wilds of Scandinavia. She also worked as a governess, teacher and companion in order to take care of her brother and sisters. Lyndall Gordon speaks of the profound affect her writings may have had on such important American political leaders such as Abigail Adams and John Adams. She had dealings with the American adventurers Joel Barlow and Imlay, and she spent time in France during the tumultuous Terror and French Revolution. She was also the mother to Mary Shelly who wrote Frankenstein, and helped continue her mother's legacy for women's rights.

I really enjoyed reading this biography because it read like a novel and I found myself totally absorbed in the life of this amazing woman. From own writings to what other people had to say about her she enchanted me from the first page with her bravery and intelligence. I can only image what it must have been like to be a woman during these restricting times and I admire all of the things she accomplished in her short life period. I look forward to reading the Gordon's biographies of Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf next.

While I respect Gordon's decision to stick closely to journals and letters in writing her biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, I wondered why she offered so little in the way of the broader political world Mary was a part of it in the late 18th century, especial since she responded to it in her writings. The author offers little in regard to the meetings that were most intriguing, like the dinner parties hosted by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, that included leading revolutionary figures like Thomas Paine and her eventual husband, William Godwin. Gordon does talk about the revolutionary ferment in Britain at the time, but doesn't expand it into a broader discussion on how Mary's writings reflected these concerns, and how she managed to effectively escape censure, unlike Thomas Paine, who found himself being tried for sedition in absentia. What we get is a set of very intriguing stories, such as her long affair with Gilbert Imlay that took her to France and Scandinavia, that wet one's appetite but fails to satisfies one interest in her as a revolutionary figure.

Mary Wollstonecraft reached a broad audience with her writings, in particular A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was in response to the new French government's Rights of Man. She, like other women who were part of the revolution, felt left out when the new government essentially turned its back on the rights of women. Mary avoided house arrest by secretly marrying Gilbert Imlay, an American in Paris. Gordon sets up many of the situations that befell Mary in Paris and her frustrating relationship with Imlay that came for nought after a long voyage to Scandinavia trying to recover his losses in regard to an ill-fated shipping venture. As with her brothers and sisters, Mary felt a strong responsibility to the man she loved, but this feeling was never fully reciprocated.

Gordon shows in detail how Mary had to deal with the paternalistic world of the late 18th century, from her good-for-nothing father, to her miserly elder brother, and the varoious relationships of her friends and family. All this is well and good, but Mary was a political writer, and we get so little of her actual thoughts on government, which were the focus of her many writings.

After all, Mary was one of the early suffragettes, and her writings form the cornerstone of feminist writings in the 19th century. Gordon alludes to Jane Austin and Virginia Woolf and other writers she felt were influenced by Mary in one way or another. Gordon had a pension for comparing Mary's real life to the fictional lives Austin had created in her novels. Time and time again, we read about what Mary suffered through, lending emotional weight to her writings, but there wasn't any real attempt to probe the intellectual origins of these writings. Mary may have saw herself as a new genus of woman, but her writings didn't come out of an intellectual void, and that is what is missing in this biography.

I actually preferred this over Frances Sherwood's novel about Mary Wollstonecraft. Whether you believe that Wollstonecraft had an affair with the painter Fuseli makes a big difference in how you perceive her. It makes her seem like a perpetual victim who was always making mistakes about men. This discredits Wollstonecraft as a pioneer of feminism. Lyndall Gordon rightly points out that there is no evidence that Wollstonecraft was involved with the married Fuseli and calls it "the Fuseli slander".

On the other hand, Gordon does engage in speculation herself. They are mostly educated speculations and there is a good chance of them being true. I thought that the speculation that Wollstonecraft's lover Imlay was a spy had the least credibility because there are other explanations for his behavior that seem more likely to me.

I was glad that Lyndall Gordon included such tantalizing bits about Shelley's first wife, Harriet Westbrook and Clare Claremont, the daughter of William Godwin's second wife. The little she has to say about them makes me think that they were extraordinary women and I'd love to know more.

In my opinion a better conceptualization Of Mary Wollstonecraft's

Life, Ideas, and Experinences is author: Frances Sherwood

Tile: Vindication.

However the Gordon book is an adequate read

It was the philosopher Hegel who first saw the enigmatic significnce of the generation of the French Revolution, calling it a birth time. Something new was coming into existence, something more than the failed revolutions that rode the tide. For reasons that almost demand the insights of the philosophy of history, that generation was one of the most innovative in world history, and the case of Mary Wollstonecraft is a perfect example of the sudden appearance of a creative individual steeping into history to break the frozen mould of mechanical culture. Thus, almost two centuries before its time, we see the prophetic birth of feminism and the gestating protest against the place of women in society. This short biography is an excellent snapshot of someone appearing as if from nowhere, not unlike Thomas Paine, to proclaim the new age of women. The portrait of the life of Wollstonecraft, from the early sufferings and explotations in a patriarchal family, to her involvement as an oberver of the French Revolution, concluding with her brief life with Godwin(and this account concludes with some material on her later descendants) is crisply told, and leaves one wondering at the symphony of effects that so suddenly gave birth to modern freedoms. We see that while feminism seems to exist currently in a postmodern context, its primordial onset is deeply braided with the dawn of modernity.