Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In December 1792 an Englishwoman of thirty-three crossed the Channel to revolutionary France..." (more)
Key Phrases: Mary Wollstonecraft, Newington Green, Joseph Johnson (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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 Brontë 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.
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From The Washington Post

Claims of "first" are notoriously risky. But Mary Wollstonecraft's declaration that she was the first of a "new genus" rings true more than two centuries after this pioneer of feminism dared make it. Abigail Adams, Emmeline Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf and the others who followed are in her wake and in her debt.

When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, she was a 33-year-old virgin. She had vowed never to marry, having witnessed her improvident, drunken father's brutality toward her mother. From the age of 15, she refused to accept a world in which the male was tyrant.

In the England of her time, wives were the property of husbands, who also owned their worldly goods and their children. There was no divorce (except by act of Parliament) and any protest was dangerous -- easily dismissed and punished as female hysteria. As Lyndall Gordon makes clear in Vindication, her exhaustively researched biography of Wollstonecraft, the threat of the madhouse hung over every 18th-century wife.

Yet for a single female with no financial prospects, what were the alternatives to marriage? To become a teacher, a paid companion, a governess or a prostitute. Self-taught, with the assistance of kindly and well-read friends and mentors, Wollstone- craft became all but the last. Her first venture into independent life came at the age of 24, when, with Rousseauistic ideas about letting a child discover its own nature and with the assistance of a generous widow, she and a close friend set up a school in North London. Next she went to Ireland as a governess to the rich Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family and there began her first novel, Mary. Losing her job when Lady Kingsborough became resentful of her superior intelligence, Wollstonecraft found a patron in the form of a London publisher, Joseph Johnson, who gave her writing commissions and found her a room near St. Paul's Cathedral. His support enabled her, at 29, to determine to live by her pen and to help her family.

In Johnson's intellectual circle she met the worldly German-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. While Wollstonecraft was comely with curly hair, a full form and dreamy brown eyes, she dressed plainly -- leading Fuseli to refer to her as a "philosophical sloven." Even so, she became fixated on Fuseli for his "grandeur of soul" and proposed moving in with him and his wife. It was during this period of frustrated love that she wrote her masterpiece, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In this acclaimed and controversial book, she attacked the educational and social restrictions that kept women in a state of "ignorance and dependency."

Spurned by Fuseli, she took herself unescorted to Paris to witness at first hand the revolution that promised to restore "natural" rights to women. Instead of a bastion of liberty, however, she found a place of blood and terror and witnessed King Louis XVI on his way to the tribunal that would send him to the guillotine. For the first time in her life, she wrote, "I cannot put out my candle."

In France she also met a dashing and intelligent American cad, Charles Imlay. She surrendered her virginity and discovered physical passion. (She was heard to reprove a Frenchwoman who boasted about her own lack of passion, "The worse for you, madame. That's a defect of nature.") Pregnancy followed, and the birth of a daughter. Imlay went to England and invited her to come as well -- which she did, but he did not join her. In despair she attempted suicide. Unmoved, Imlay directed her to go to Scandinavia and try to recover for him a supposed lost cargo of silver. The attempt was in vain. Imlay never kept his promise to join her and their child; he had another mistress. She wrote a book on Scandinavia instead, and her many deeply moving letters to her betrayer show that a feminist can also be a woman who waits and weeps.

Wollstonecraft eventually returned to London; after more waiting and weeping and another suicide attempt, she met a rescuer in the unprepossessing form of the philosopher and social reformer William Godwin. Love grew, and though the sex was apparently not what it had been with Imlay, another pregnancy swiftly followed. Godwin did the decent thing and married her, although they continued to live separately. But the scales were balanced against the female. At the age of 38, Wollstonecraft died bearing his child.

The tedious question thrown at biographers -- "Do we need another book about . . . ?" -- is demolished by Gordon's adventurous scholarship. Wollstonecraft has been the subject of many biographies, notably Claire Tomlinson's groundbreaking The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1974. Gordon's fresh approach places this early feminist in the context of the American and French Revolutions. What Wollstonecraft saw happening on both sides of the Atlantic led her to call for rights and independence for women -- as well as an end to the "abominable traffic" in slaves.

Goodall's biography unfortunately bogs down in unclear narrative, gratuitous information and indulgent digressions, some of which, such as the Scandinavian episode, should have been curtailed. It is understandable, however, that nearly one-third of this book is devoted to Wollstonecraft's posthumous legacy and reputation. Her first daughter killed herself at 22, convinced that no one wanted her. Her daughter by Godwin lived to marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their daughter Mary Shelley went on to write Frankenstein. It is just as well that Wollstonecraft's many 19th-century critics did not realize this, as they searched for insults to throw at the immoral mother of feminism, "Frankenstein's grandmother" would have suited them very well.

Godwin himself, whom she characterized, in her last words, as "the kindest, and best man in the world," gave comfort to her critics. In his Memoirs of the Author of "The Rights of Woman"' he described his late wife as a genius but also as a woman who enjoyed love outside marriage.

This left her open to attacks in the next century, when Browning slandered her in a poem and feminists distanced themselves from her in the fear that her dissolute life would damage their cause. Even the American president John Adams, though he read her book on the French Revolution twice, made notes calling her "this mad woman."

She was not mad but brave. For sheer courage Wollstonecraft's rich achievement will be hard to match, as will her eloquence: "It is time to effect a revolution in female manners," she wrote in her Vindication -- "time to restore them their lost dignity -- and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world."

Reviewed by Brenda Maddox
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; First Edition edition (May 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060198028
• ISBN-13: 978-0060198022
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #882,967 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Too much, too little, but enough, June 10, 2005

By	N. McCabe - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Illumination, June 15, 2005

By	rctnyc (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing account of a great life, December 24, 2005

By	JoL (NY, NY) - See all my reviews

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.