Mary Wollstonecraft in Context

Provides crucial biographical, critical, historical, and cultural context for the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Britain's first feminist and political theorist. Leading scholars provide students and scholars of eighteenth-century feminism, literature, social, and political theory with essential background to understand Wollstonecraft's diverse writing.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was one of the most influential and controversial women of her age. No writer, except perhaps her political foe, Edmund Burke, and her fellow reformer, Thomas Paine, inspired more intense reactions. In her brief literary career before her untimely death in 1797, Wollstonecraft achieved remarkable success in an unusually wide range of genres: from education tracts and political polemics, to novels and travel writing. Just as impressive as her expansive range was the profound evolution of her thinking in the decade when she flourished as an author. In this collection of essays, leading international scholars reveal the intricate biographical, critical, cultural, and historical context crucial for understanding Mary Wollstonecraft''s oeuvre. Chapters on British radicalism and conservatism, French philosophes and English Dissenters, constitutional law and domestic law, sentimental literature, eighteenth-century periodicals and more elucidate Wollstonecraft''s social and political thought, historical writings, moral tales for children, and novels.