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MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION
Barbara Taylor
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003
THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Janet Todd, Ed.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2003
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was never afraid of asking hard questions. As Ann Crittendon notes in The Price of Motherhood (2001), after the American and French Revolutions, "Wollstonecraft posed the perfectly logical question: How could societies founded on the principles of universal human rights deny those rights to women?" Her questions stay with her reader. And so does her rebellious example of seizing life and living it by her own moral precepts. Wollstonecraft remains a controversial figure: her entry in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (1990) refers to Wollstonecraft as "a focus of admiration and loathing." In comparison to scholarly publications about her contemporaries, figures such as Catherine Maccaulay, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Mary Hays, Wollstonecraft stands out with a "gritty unfeminine iconoclasm" (Taylor).
The two books reviewed here provide readers with an opportunity to revisit her work and her intense life and times. In Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Barbara Taylor reads Wollstone-craft's writing and interprets her life in the context of "her own intellectual world." In The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, editor Janet Todd focuses on Wollstonecraft the letter writer, and argues that " Wollstonecraft's value is as much in letter-writing as in public authorship."
An authority on feminist literary history, Todd-also the author of Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life-notes, "Wollstonecraft grows [in her letters] from the awkward child of fourteen to the woman of thirty-eight facing her death in childbirth." "She was writing," Todd reminds us, "on the hoof, in cramped lodgings, on swaying boats, in the wilds of Scandinavia or in freezing Paris before queuing for bread, or between reviewings in London, or indeed before plunging into the Thames to end her life."
In the age of email, we erase the correspondence of friends. By contrast, those who received Wollstonecraft's letters usually saved them. Wollstonecraft's correspondence with her lover, the American businessman Gilbert Imlay, was returned when she requested it. Todd states, "although it must have increased her pain, perhaps when she reread it...