Synopses & Reviews
Mary Wollstonecraft was an extraordinary individual, yet her literary life exemplifies how many women of her time used print culture to bring about change. This study argues that Protestant society had traditionally sanctioned women's role in spreading literacy, but this became politicized in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft's literary vocation was shaped by the high expectations in both the radical circles of Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson, and the Girondins in revolutionary Paris, of the power of print to educate and reform individuals and society.
Review
"Franklin admirably traces such a feeling logic throughout her subject's published work, notebooks and letters, building an engaging picture of a woman possessed of reason but whose internal fire belittled the feeble sensibilities of those she sought to undermine."--Emma Mason,
Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
Mary Wollstonecraft was an extraordinary individual, yet her literary life exemplifies how many women of her time used print culture to bring about change. This study argues that Protestant society had traditionally sanctioned women's role in spreading literacy, but this became politicized in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft's literary vocation was shaped by the high expectations in both the radical circles of Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson, and the Girondins in revolutionary Paris, of the power of print to educate and reform individuals and society.
About the Author
Caroline Franklin is Reader in English at the University of Wales, Swansea.
Table of Contents
Preface and Suggestions for Further Reading * Acknowledgements * List of Abbreviations * Chronology * 'A genius will educate itself': Mary Wollstonecraft as Autodidact * 'When the voices of children are heard on the green': Mary Wollstonecraft the Author-Educator * 'The first of a new genus': Proud to be a Female Journalist * 'An Amazon stept out': Wollstonecraft and the Revolution Debate * 'The true perfection of man': Print, Public Opinion and the Idea of Progress * The Commercial Traveller, the Imagination and the Material World * 'We did not marry': The Comedy and Tragedy of Marriage in Life and Fiction * Postscript * Notes * Index