Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (Lives in Letters S.) - Hardcover

Todd, Janet

3.67

73 ratings by Goodreads

9780297842996: Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (Lives in Letters S.)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297842994 ISBN 13: 9780297842996

Publisher: Orion, 2000

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Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759. She was largely self-educated and worked as a school teacher, governess and editor. She made contact with the circle of radicals and artists which included Blake, Paine, Fuseli and Godwin. She went to Paris in 1792, met Gilbert Imlay and gave birth to their child. She married Godwin in 1797 but died after the birth of their daughter Mary (later Mary Shelley). The inner life of Mary Wollstonecraft is remarkably displayed in her personal letters, both in those from her early years to her friends and sisters and in those pathetic later ones to her lover Gilbert Imlay. Current biographies, all dating from the 1970s, as the times demanded, show the formation of the feminist and the genesis of the public works, especially of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Each biography used the letters copiously but none dwelt on them or quoted them at length. Indeed Claire Tomalin, whose biography is now the most accessible in Britain, was clearly embarrassed by the pleading approaches to Imlay and played down an episode which was central to Wollstonecraft's life and intellectual development.
Janet Todd's biography will connect, for the first time, Mary Wollstonecraft's published works with her letters and discuss the psychological revelations, the desires and fears revealed in them. It will show how printed and private writings together reveal the divided nature of Wollstonecraft and the personal motivations of many of her general political themes. It will capture the emerging character of the woman who never ceased to reveal herself in all her writings.

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Review:

Identified as one of the founders of modern feminism, the life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) has become a symbol of women's struggle between love and politics. Janet Todd's outstanding biography does justice to both aspects of that life from Wollstonecraft's girlhood--as a child, she was a keen observer of the appalling relationship between her parents--to her often troubled, yet vivid, experience as a woman who broke with so many of the conventions of her day. It is easy to consider Wollstonecraft in terms of the scandal and sensation that surrounded her: as an intellectual, certainly--the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman at the beginning of the 1790s cast Wollstonecraft as a "hyena in petticoats"--but also as a passionate, and sexual, woman willing to pursue her desires to the point of bearing a child out of wedlock and re-inventing the marriage contract in her well-documented relationship with the radical philosopher William Godwin. Part of the strength of Todd's biography is the context and texture, she brings to her subject, her presentation of the emotional and intellectual complexity of Wollstonecraft's life and milieu. Mary Wollstonecraft is a fluid and dramatic, read, each chapter using a citation from Wollstonecraft's writings--"I am averse to any matrimonial tie", "Emotions that trembled on the brink of ecstasy and agony", "You will, perhaps accuse me of insensibility"--to introduce and thematise the events of the life as well as the preoccupations of the work (fiction as well as politics). At issue throughout are the dilemmas of a woman's life: Wollstonecraft's commitment to female ties, female friendship, female experience. It's a commitment that, as so many have noted before, has its ironic conclusion in her death from complications following the birth of her second daughter (Mary Shelley) in September 1797--an irony that Todd captures here, as elsewhere, through the words that Wollstonecraft left behind her: "I am in the most natural state." --Vicky Lebeau

Review:

Throughout this humane and absorbing biography, Todd usefully places the writings, like A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in their historical context, but in the end she finds Wollstonecraft's life and her letters more modern in their outspoken sensibility than her formal literary legacy. The New Yorker The only full-length scholarly biography to date, it is full of fascinating detail, absorbing, and often surprising. The New Republic The hard work and family values attributed to the middle class hardly obtained in the Wollstonecraft entourage, as Janet Todd makes clear in this thorough biography...Todd excels at depicting her subject's evolving personality and layered intellect. Washington Post Todd... draws heavily on Wollstonecraft's letters in this thoughtful biography... Wollstonecraft traveled uncharted waters: her voice, though egotistical, is unquestionably modern, a ' consciousness... sure of its significance, individuality and authenticity. Appropriate where biographies and women's studies are popular. Booklist Todd brings [Wollstonecraft] back to life in all her splendid contradictions, without condescension, idealization or, happily, without recourse to intrusive psychologizing. Publishers Weekly Todd tells the story of Mary Wollstonecraft's extraordinary life with calm judiciousness, an excellent sense of the social, intellectual, and economic spheres in which her subject lived and wrote, and a good eye for small but telling details. Times Literary Supplement Against the richly detailed tapestry of her times, Janet Todd has stitched the bright, vivid, restless, and agitated figure of one of the most fascinating and controversial thinkers of her time and proved -- through the sympathy, understanding, and intelligence with which she portrays her -- that she remains fascinating today. -- Anita Desai Todd reveals all in her top-notch and fascinating portrait, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. Library Journal A much longer revision of theories about nationalism and nations is now needed, to complement the brilliant destructive assaults in... After the Empire. London Review of Books Todd writes with verve, authority...and rhetorical grace. -- Anne K. Mellor Signs Winter 2005

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