词条 | Wollstonecraft, Mary |
释义 | Wollstonecraft, Mary English author married name Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin born April 27, 1759, London, England died September 10, 1797, London ![]() The daughter of a farmer, Wollstonecraft taught school and worked as a governess, experiences that inspired her views in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). In 1788 she began working as a translator for the London publisher James Johnson, who published several of her works, including the novel Mary: A Fiction (1788). Her mature work on woman's place in society is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which calls for women and men to be educated equally. In 1792 Wollstonecraft left England to observe the French Revolution in Paris, where she lived with an American, Captain Gilbert Imlay. In the spring of 1794 she gave birth to a daughter, Fanny. The following year, distraught over the breakdown of her relationship with Imlay, she attempted suicide. Wollstonecraft returned to London to work again for Johnson and joined the influential radical group that gathered at his home and that included William Godwin (Godwin, William), Thomas Paine (Paine, Thomas), Thomas Holcroft (Holcroft, Thomas), William Blake (Blake, William), and, after 1793, William Wordsworth (Wordsworth, William). In 1796 she began a liaison with Godwin, and on March 29, 1797, Mary being pregnant, they were married. The marriage was happy but brief; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died 11 days after the birth of her second daughter, Mary (Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft). ![]() The publication of Vindication caused considerable controversy but failed to bring about any immediate reforms. From the 1840s, however, members of the incipient American and European women's movements resurrected some of the book's principles. It was a particular influence on American women's rights pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Stanton, Elizabeth Cady) and Margaret Fuller (Fuller, Margaret). The life of Mary Wollstonecraft has been the subject of several biographies, beginning with her husband's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798, reissued 2001, in an edition edited by Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker). Those written in the 19th century tended to emphasize the scandalous aspects of her life and not her work. With the renewed interest in women's rights in the later 20th century, she again became the subject of several books. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, assembled by Janet Todd, was published in 2003. Additional Reading Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft (1984); Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, rev. ed. (1992); Janet M. Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000); Diane Jacobs, Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2001); and Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (also published as Mary Wollstonecraft: A New Genus, 2005), cover her life and work. Wil Verhoeven, Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (2008), describes Wollstonecraft's relationship with Imlay. Critical interpretations of Wollstonecraft are presented in Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue (1992); Syndy McMillen Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (1994); Maria J. Falco (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (1996); and Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003). |
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