MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

A biography of the famed author and feminist, written by British academic and editor Todd (A Wollstonecraft Anthology, not reviewed).

Pushy, excitable, proud, highly imaginative, and terrifically self-assured, Wollstonecraft moved through a remarkable range of intellectual and moral positions with the determination and tenacity that marks an authentic search for truth and self-fulfillment. The author stresses the seriousness and originality of this search, carefully tracing the elements of morality, politics, sexuality, and imagination that kept reconfiguring themselves in Wollstonecraft’s views back to her experience. This canny and articulate biography also makes it clear that the mother of modern feminism was a drama queen of no mean proportions: tactless, self-absorbed, with a capacity for complaint and reproach as inexhaustible as her energy and intellectual openness. Such a figure should and does make for a lively narrative. In addition to following her rather bizarre series of love affairs, both chaste and carnal, we see Wollstonecraft as a young governess hilariously snubbing her aristocratic employer; as a radical author in revolutionary Paris watching in horror as ever more heads rolled away from the guillotine; and as a soon-to-be-abandoned woman traveling gamely in Scandinavia, baby and seasick maid in tow, competently doing business for her lover Gilbert Imlay while at the same time writing reams of needy, reproachful, and clingy letters to him. Throughout, her life was characterized by contradictory forces of pitiful dependence and self-deception on one hand and tremendous will and self-sufficiency on the other. Especially compelling in this regard is her relationship with her sisters, whom she supported, bullied, and ignored by turns, and her famously unconventional marriage to William Godwin, who kept a separate household from her.

Wollstonecraft’s egoism was the touchstone of her work. This intelligent and well-formed study offers both a clear illustration of the source and significance of that connection and an absorbing account of the extraordinary life that engendered it.