Paperback, 264 pages
English language
Published May 1, 1980 by Oxford University Press.
Mary and the Wrongs of Woman
3 stars
(1 review)
Mary Wollstonecraft's life has tended to overshadow her writing. Not only was her life romantically short and dramatically ended, but it was crammed with varied and often melodramatic incident. She was a mistress and a mother before she was a wife; she saw and survived the French Revolution; and she was admired by a number of leading politicians, artists, and thinkers of the day. But it is not her varied experience of her vibrant milieu which make her of enduring interest; it is, rather, her powerful and original imagination, shaping experience and hard-won knowledge into the ardent radical philosophy which lay behind all her writing.
Both pre-revolutionary Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman (1798) are autobiographical, but in the later work the theme is broadened into a tale of universal human relevance, transcending the local and individual.
"The Wrongs of Woman, like the wrongs of the oppressed part of …
Mary Wollstonecraft's life has tended to overshadow her writing. Not only was her life romantically short and dramatically ended, but it was crammed with varied and often melodramatic incident. She was a mistress and a mother before she was a wife; she saw and survived the French Revolution; and she was admired by a number of leading politicians, artists, and thinkers of the day. But it is not her varied experience of her vibrant milieu which make her of enduring interest; it is, rather, her powerful and original imagination, shaping experience and hard-won knowledge into the ardent radical philosophy which lay behind all her writing.
Both pre-revolutionary Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman (1798) are autobiographical, but in the later work the theme is broadened into a tale of universal human relevance, transcending the local and individual.
"The Wrongs of Woman, like the wrongs of the oppressed part of mankind, may be deemed necessary by their oppressors: but surely there are a few, who will dare to advance before the improvement of the age, and grant that my sketches are not the abortion of a distempered fancy, or the strong delineations of a wounded heart."
