| Description |
x, 562 pages ; 24 cm |
| Summary |
"Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the founder of modern feminism - in her time, the most famous woman in Europe and America. In this new biography, Lyndall Gordon proposes that at each stage of a passionate and courageous life - as teacher, writer, lover, and traveler - Mary Wollstonecraft was an original. She had advanced ideas on education, and her views on single motherhood, family responsibilities, working life, domestic affections, friendships, and sexual relationships now look astonishingly modern. She tested new ways a man and a woman might come to know each other and live together. "Imagination must lead the senses, not the senses the imagination," she told her American lover, Gilbert Imlay, and repeated to her husband, William Godwin." |
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"Vindication is the first biography to show this remarkable woman at full strength and bring out the range as well as the reverberations of her genius in the following and subsequent generations. Here is the drama of Wollstonecraft's life as a governess in an aristocratic family in Ireland, as an independent writer in London, as an on-the-scene observer of the French Revolution, and as a daring traveler to Scandinavia on the trail of an unsolved crime. Although she died young, her spirit and unconventional ideas lived on in the lives of her daughter, Mary Shelley, and three other heirs who had to contend with a counterrevolutionary age. Vindication offers new evidence for the influence of early American political thought in England and demonstrates for the first time the profound effect of Mary Wollstonecraft's own writing, especially her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, on American figures of the day, among them John and Abigail Adams |
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This biography follows the colorful wheelings and dealings of young American adventurers like Joel Barlow and the elusive frontiersman Imlay, who sought their fortunes amid the tumultuous events of late-eighteenth-century Europe and whose clandestine service to the fledgling American government is newly explored."--BOOK JACKET |
| Notes |
"Published in Great Britain in 2005 under the title: Mary Wollstonecraft by Little, Brown"--T.p. verso |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [519]-539) and index |
| Subject |
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797.
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Authors, English -- 18th century -- Biography.
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Feminists -- Great Britain -- Biography.
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| Genre/Form |
Biographies.
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| LC no. |
2005040237 |
| ISBN |
0060198028 |
|
0060957743 paperback |
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