Mary Wollstonecraft

Susan Laird, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781472504869
• eBook ISBN: 9781441159854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Best known as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), if not also as mother of Frankenstein's author Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft survived domestic violence and unusual independent womanhood to write engaging letters, fiction, history, critical reviews, handbooks and treatises. Her work on coeducational thought was a major early modern influence upon the development of a post-Enlightenment tradition, and continues to have vital relevance today.

Celebrated as an early modern feminist, abolitionist and socialist philosopher, Wollstonecraft had little formal schooling, but still worked as a governess, school-teacher and educational writer. This succinct critical account of that prolific research begins by recounting her revolutionary self-education. Susan Laird explains how Wollstonecraft came to criticize moral flaws in both men's and women's private education based on irrational assumptions about 'sexual character' under the Divine Right of Kings. It was to remedy those moral flaws of monarchist education that Wollstonecraft theorized her influential, but incomplete, concept of publicly financed, universal, egalitarian coeducation.

Part One

Intellectual Biography

Had Mary Wollstonecraft not written a line,

her life would have furnished food for thought.

Emma Goldman

Chapter 1

Revolutionary Self-Education

Wollstonecraft’s Landscapes

Born just a year before George III ascends the throne, on 25 April, 1759, in a merchant’s house in Spitalfields, a ‘rather shoddy, overcrowded area of London noted for its shifting immigrant populations and its weavers’,1 Mary Wollstonecraft experiences both urban and rural English life as a child. Many times she moves with her downwardly mobile family – to Essex, to Yorkshire, back to London, to Wales and Middlesex – before making the unconventional choice to leave home in 1778 to provide for her own living. As an independent young woman she works for a short time in Bath and Windsor and then also in Ireland, trying the few respectable occupations then available to Englishwomen (lady’s companion, cottage seamstress, aristocrat’s governess); thus she witnesses a wide range of differently situated women’s lives. Besides working briefly in Dublin, she travels alone to her beloved friend Fanny Blood’s deathbed in Lisbon, to France as a correspondent writing on the Revolution, and to Scandinavia as a commercial emissary, travel writer and single mother. She fantasizes about moving to Kentucky with her infant daughter, Fanny’s American father, Gilbert Imlay, and her sisters Everina and Eliza, but never does. Despite her many moves and travels and despite the Yorkshire dialect expressions she retains from living in Walkington and Beverley between the ages of nine and fifteen, Wollstonecraft is ‘always a Londoner’:2 sharing her family’s lodgings in Hoxton and Walworth before leaving home, later making her home in Islington and then in Newington Green as a schoolmistress, making her life as a writer first in the vicinity of Blackfriars Bridge and finally with political philosopher William Godwin in Somers Town. There she gives birth to their daughter, the future novelist Mary Shelley, on 30 August, and dies on 10 September, 1797. Wollstonecraft’s tomb in Old Pancras Churchyard is now empty, but its carved stone marker immortalizes her still as ‘Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’.

That work is the English-speaking world’s first widely read argument for women’s full independence and citizenship. Premised upon an educational critique of the Divine Right of Kings and concluding with a revolutionary thought experiment proposing a national system of coeducation that includes government-funded universal schooling, it is also her most significant educational legacy. No less concerned to examine what devotion to a rational and loving God may require,3 to challenge the ethics of commercialism or of militarism, or to vindicate the rights of men denied by monarchy, Wollstonecraft may also be the first writer to link revolutionary sexual politics with opposition to the colonial slave trade.4 She plays a leading (but by no means solo) part in what Eve Tavor Bannet has called ‘the domestic revolution’ of Enlightenment feminisms.5 In an epoch largely shaped by the English Revolution of 1688, Wollstonecraft also commends and criticizes effects of both the American and French Revolutions. Literati have canonized her as a prolific early modern ‘woman writer’ of fine travel narrative and brilliant polemics, as well as of experimental novels that ‘point to the specificity of the body’ and ‘imagine a “proto-lesbian” space’.6 She has achieved recognition, too, as ‘one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century’.7 By what means can such a common woman in Georgian England have become educated to make such uncommon contributions to educational thought and culture?

In St Paul’s Churchyard, London, in a garret near the shop where her generous patron Joseph Johnson prints, publishes, and sells serious books on religion, law, and medicine, as well as some fiction and poetry, she dines often with him and other prominent authors whose work he publishes also – mostly men, but also a few women. They don’t call her ‘Mary’, Virginia Woolf explains: just ‘Wollstonecraft’ (1932, 157). Although Wollstonecraft has familiarized herself with Georgian Englishwomen’s meager educational landscape through her work as governess to titled Irish aristocrats and as mistress of a small village school for religious dissenters’ children, she has had little schooling herself. Indeed, she is mostly self-educated. Janet Todd depicts Wollstonecraft as ‘poor and severe’ at age nineteen:

. . . a tall young woman with auburn hair. She had light brown eyes, one lid of which was slightly paralyzed, giving her a sometimes mocking, leering look. She was not conventionally pretty but, when stimulated by company, became vivacious and striking, and she was thought handsome enough.8

Writing for school-aged readers, Miriam Brody reports that at age thirty Wollstonecraft

. . . made a striking impression: Her hair was not carefully combed, her dress was simple and not always tidy. She came from barely furnished rooms that had been put together with little money or interest in comfort or luxury. She was similarly uninterested in her appearance. But whatever plainness there was in her clothing, there was nothing shy about her presence.9

According to Lyndall Gordon, ‘She combined a dreamy voluptuousness with quick words, fixing brown eyes on her listener. The eyes didn’t quite match, as though the right eye lingered in thought while the left drew one into intimacy with that thought’.10 Thus Wollstonecraft’s most scholarly twenty-first-century biographers make vivid her engaging presence in exhilarating conversations that continue often late into the night around Johnson’s dinner table, weekly set for his authors with wine and plain food such as boiled cod, roasted veal, vegetables, and rice pudding.11

Here they argue about deism and atheism and discuss the possible progress of human nature, both intellectual and moral. They talk about what reason and education might do to bring happiness and virtue together. While working with them to educate the public via the print medium, Wollstonecraft learns much from these conversations and thus claims for herself something like an advanced higher education, otherwise inaccessible to her. Noting her ‘talents for conversation’ (M, 260), Godwin reports in his Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ that ‘The society she frequented, nourished her understanding, and enlarged her mind’ (M, 229). She develops ‘a new aesthetic appreciation of imagination and genius’,12 and ‘The prejudices of her early years suffered a vehement concussion’ (M, 229), for frequently those conversations turn to the revolutionary landscapes of France and the brand-new United States, whose slavery Wollstonecraft deplores. At Johnson’s, she gets a hint of what power such friendly ‘jostlings of equality’ among women and men who love learning might do to improve women’s lives, as well as national life more generally (W5, 245). In the empire-building landscape of Georgian England, this is the uncommonly hospitable milieu within which Wollstonecraft writes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the milieu within which she becomes the philosophical mother of coeducation.

A. Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Landscape (1787–92): Writing to Educate

Johnson publishes all of Wollstonecraft’s works, beginning in 1787 with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life, as she closes her school and embarks upon new employment as a governess. When her employer fires her, she begins to write extensively for Johnson’s journal Analytical Review, later serving also as its assistant editor. Besides reviews and translations, he subsequently also publishes her autobiographical novel of self-education, Mary: A Fiction (1788); her collection of moral-educational fiction for children, Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788); and her curriculum, The Female Reader (1789, under the pseudonym ‘Mr Cresswick’). Johnson publishes her critique of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), anonymously. But the following month he re-publishes it with her by-line, establishing her as a revolutionary political thinker. Her Real Life achieves extreme popularity also, justifying its later republication by Johnson with six illustrations engraved by mystical artist, poet, and social critic William Blake (1791), who admires Wollstonecraft enough to write a poem to and about her. During this period of her prolific authorship for Johnson, Wollstonecraft makes some significant friendships, not least with Johnson himself and, far less prudently, also with his close friend, Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. Immediately following Johnson’s second publication of Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft leaves London to undertake work as a correspondent during the Revolution in France. She meets Godwin at Johnson’s dinner table before leaving London, but they do not become friends until after her return from her European travels, when Johnson publishes her writing based on them. Those are the last works she completes for publication before her death in 1797: An Historical View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Although Wollstonecraft’s fame rests upon Rights of Woman, literati have, like Godwin, judged Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to be her finest written work.

Godwin reports that Johnson invites her ‘to make his house her home’ for a couple weeks initially (M, 225); then he finds modest, safe, and comfortable lodgings for her, and manages her commerce with tradesmen. All her work sells well, and despite many loans he makes to her and other members of his circle, without harassing any debtors, his business flourishes, making her modest but apparently sufficient means for living more reliable than she ever could otherwise have hoped. Although she remains poor, in debt to Johnson throughout her life, the living he provides is secure enough for her often to help her younger siblings and also, circa 1791–2, to house and care for an Irish friend’s motherless seven-year-old niece Ann, until shortly before leaving London to work as Johnson’s correspondent in Paris (M, 228; CL, 182, 189–90, 197–98, 213, 221).13 The sine qua non of Wollstonecraft’s life’s work is beyond doubt her enduringly loyal, affectionately intimate, but clearly asexual friendship with this liberal publisher, an asthmatic bachelor sexually uninterested in women, who develops ‘a great personal regard for her, which resembled in many respects that of a parent’ (M, 228). He nurtures her developing revolutionary and educational thought in a multitude of thoughtful ways, and she even comes to regard him at times as her ‘only friend’, as she writes to him with gratitude (CL, 166). Besides publishing her writing, Johnson affectionately offers Wollstonecraft his time and his ear no less than his money and other material help. She confides in him, and he understands her; they dine together regularly, and she corresponds with him whenever she is away from London.

Johnson’s long-time close friend Fuseli, a multi-lingual artist from Zurich, convinced of his own genius and of ‘the divinity of genius’ (M, 234), visits him two or three times a week, and thus becomes for a time Wollstonecraft’s creative ‘soul-mate’ in learning.14 Her instantly close and uncommonly intense friendship with this bisexual and philandering married man, famous for his ‘malevolent wit’ and for his betrayals of friends,15 seems to have been platonic, according to her most recent and thorough scholarly biographers, despite her ‘personal and ardent affection for him’ (M, 234). Heretofore a woman-loving marriage resister, Wollstonecraft remains ‘self-protective’,16 convinced that ‘true virtue would prescribe the most entire celibacy’ (M, 235). But the sexual (some say pornographic) explicitness of Fuseli’s art may eroticize their friendship, which responds to her emotional neediness and thus pulls her into an immature emotional vortex of naive foolishness nonetheless. Nursing a life-long hunger for intellectually intimate friendship and loving family life, she cannot understand why he and his beautiful uneducated...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Intellectual Biography
• Part 2 Exposition of the Work
• Part 3 Reception and Influence of the Work
• Part 4 Relevance of the Work
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright