Mary Wollstonecraft Takes Up Writing
From the circle of English intellectuals to whom she'd been introduced through Rev. Price, Mary Wollstonecraft had met Joseph Johnson, a leading publisher of the liberal ideas of England.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote and published a novel, Mary, a Fiction, which was a thinly-disguised novel drawing heavily on her own life.
Just before she'd written Mary, a Fiction, she'd written to her sister about reading Rousseau, and her admiration for his attempt to portray in fiction the ideas which he believed. Clearly, Mary, a Fiction was in part her answer to Rousseau, an attempt to portray the way that a woman's limited options and the serious oppression of a woman by circumstances in her life, led her to a bad end.
Mary Wollstonecraft also published a children's book, Original Stories from Real Life, again integrating fiction and reality creatively. To further her goal of financial self-sufficiency, she also took on translation, and published a translation from French of a book by Jacques Necker.
Joseph Johnson recruited Mary Wollstonecraft to write reviews and articles for his journal, Analytical Review. As part of Johnson's and Price's circles, she met and interacted with many of the great thinkers of the time. Their admiration for the French Revolution was a frequent topic of their discussions.
Liberty in the Air
Certainly, this was a period of exhilaration for Mary Wollstonecraft. Accepted into circles of intellectuals, beginning to make her living with her own efforts, and expanding her own education through reading and discussion, she had achieved a position in sharp contrast to that of her mother, sister, and friend Fanny. The hopefulness of the liberal circle about the French Revolution and its potentials for liberty and human fulfillment plus her own more secure life are reflected in Wollstonecraft's energy and enthusiasm.
In 1791, in London, Mary Wollstonecraft attended a dinner for Thomas Paine hosted by Joseph Johnson. Paine, whose recent The Rights of Man had defended the French Revolution, was among the writers Johnson published -- others included Priestley, Coleridge, Blake and Wordsworth. (At this dinner, she met another of the writers for Johnson's Analytical Review, William Godwin. His recollection was that the two of them -- Godwin and Wollstonecraft -- immediately took a dislike to each other, and their loud and angry argument over dinner made it nearly impossible for the better-known guests to even attempt conversation.)
The Rights of Men
When Edmund Burke wrote his response to Paine's The Rights of Man, his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Mary Wollstonecraft published her response, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. As was common for women writers and with anti-revolutionary sentiment quite volatile in England, she published it anonymously at first, adding her name in 1791 to the second edition.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft takes exception to one of Burke's points: that chivalry by the more powerful makes unnecessary rights for the less powerful. Illustrating her own argument are examples of the lack of chivalry, not only in practice but imbedded in English law. Chivalry was not, for Mary or for many women, their experience of how more powerful men acted towards women.
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Later in 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, further exploring issues of women's education, women's equality, women's status, women's rights and the role of public/private, political/domestic life.
Off to Paris
After correcting her first edition of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and issuing a second, Wollstonecraft decided to go directly to Paris to see for herself what the French Revolution was evolving towards.
Continued: About Mary Wollstonecraft
- The Legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft
- Rights in the Air
- What Rights?
- Grounded in Experience - Early Life
- Mary Wollstonecraft, Writer
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay: Paris and Sweden
- Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin: The End and Beyond
- Mary Wollstonecraft: Conclusions About Her Life and Work
Related Resources
- About Mary Wollstonecraft
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quotations
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- The Unsex'd Females - Poem by Richard Polwhele
- Book List
- Biographies on the Net
- Wollstonecraft's Writings
- Analysis/Criticism
- Judith Sargent Murray
- Olympe de Gouges
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
