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Biographical, Literary and Historic Scholarship at Its Sharpest: On Mary Wollstonecraft Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen, eds., Mary Wollstonecraft in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 360pp. ISBN: 9781-108-41699-3.
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In contrast with the preceding philosophizing on Austen, this book is a practically useful tool for researchers of Mary Wollstonecraft (17591797). Across my decades of studying and writing scholarly articles, textbooks that place classical writers in "context" are almost always extremely useful in offering multiple forms of evidence that should help almost any type of research into a given writer. It is tedious to haunt down dozens of books to address the types of compressed information that tends to be found in a "context" collection of essays. Typically, I dislike essay collections because they tend to be disjointed, and some are almost always added for volume rather than because they are rational contributions to the topic. But these types of authorcontext collections screen out nonsense by focusing on a few elements that are needed for a researcher to understand a new author under examination. These elements cover biography, early and later critical reception, social and historical context, political and philosophical subjects of primary interest to the author, and the generic, linguistic and structural components of the fiction. Participating in one of these collections must be a superior honor because there are almost never any stray articles that lack some enriching message that supplements the rest.
"Wollstonecraft achieved remarkable success in an unusually wide range of genres: from education tracts and political polemics, to novels and travel writing. Just as...