Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
Lyndall Gordon
Language: English
Pages: 592
ISBN: 0060957743
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The founder of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the most famous woman of her era. A brilliant, unconventional rebel vilified for her strikingly modern notions of education, family, work, and personal relationships, she nevertheless strongly influenced political philosophy in Europe and a newborn America. Now acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon mounts a spirited defense of this courageous woman whose reputation has suffered over the years by painting a full and vibrant portrait of an extraordinary historical figure who was generations ahead of her time.
that I was with child: and let them stare! and–, and–, nay, all the world, may know it for aught I care!’ Her words were defiant, but she did shrink from ‘coarse jokes’. It took some pluck to sustain nonchalance with people who questioned a pregnant woman on her own, and this may be one reason for her decision, a few days later, to leave Paris. During that first week of January she was visited by a member of the American network who (she reports to Imlay) ‘incautiously let fall’ something she
deterrent to women’s intellectual aspirations. ‘never thrive’: MWL, 98; MWletters, 61. the American model of ‘rights’: Exercised in a series of declarations by the first Continental Congress of American states in October 1774, which had led to their nine-year battle to free themselves from British rule. ‘to the United States…’: Cited in article on Price in the old Dictionary of National Biography. the London Friends of the People: Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels & Reactionaries, 42. ‘the
Price had his ear and those of other American leaders at the start of their debate on the Constitution. Where the Declaration of Independence had been idealistic, even utopian, the Constitution was realistic about the power-grabbing element in human nature. It was brilliantly balanced, with curbs on power on every side. Yet it had two flaws. The lesser was the failure to grant equality to women: I say lesser, because until Wollstonecraft publicised what would be for more than a century to come
diminished their silliness. The FitzGerald girls were also schooled in modern languages. They appear in Mary Wollstonecraft’s first novel as girls whose ‘minds had received very little cultivation. They were taught French, Italian, and Spanish; English was their vulgar tongue. And what did they learn? Hamlet will tell you–words–words. But let me not forget that they squalled Italian songs in the true gusto. Without having any seeds sewn in their understanding, or the affections of the heart set
who controlled or were themselves the Members of Parliament who initiated and carried through these legalised appropriations. New boundaries–ditches, hedges and walls (including the new wall around Mitchelstown Castle)–were a visual reminder of the power of the landlord to exclude outsiders from territory over which he now exercised sole rights. Apart from changing the landscape for ever, the result was to wall off the landed from the labouring classes. So, the excluded were feared, and a