The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft

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Allen Lane, 2003 - Biography & Autobiography - 477 pages
"Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century. She talked and thought on paper: her letters were a large part of the drama of her life. In them we see her grow from an awkward child of fourteen into the pioneering feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and finally into the woman of thirty-eight facing death in childbirth." "This edition contains the complete correspondence of Mary Wollstonecraft, including a recently discovered interchange with the historian Catherine Macaulary and the only known fragments of letters to the Swiss artist Fuseli, with whom Wollstonecraft had a passionate friendship."--BOOK JACKET.

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Contents

Yorkshire 17731774 I
15
London Region 17821786
36
Ireland 17861787
84
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London on April 27, 1759. She opened a school in Newington Green with her sister Eliza and a friend Fanny Blood in 1784. Her experiences lead her to attack traditional teaching methods and suggested new topics of study in Thoughts on the Education of Girls. In 1792, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she attacked the educational restrictions that kept women ignorant and dependant on men as well as describing marriage as legal prostitution. In Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, published unfinished in 1798, she asserted that women had strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise. In 1793, Wollstonecraft became involved with American writer Gilbert Imlay and had a daughter named Fanny. After this relationship ended, she married William Godwin in March 1797 and had a daughter named Mary in August. Wollstonecraft died from complications following childbirth on September 10, 1797. Her daughter Mary later married Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.

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