Wrongs Of Woman Research Articles

Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution by Deborah Kennedy, and: Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance. Frances Burney to Jane Austen by Susan C. Greenfield (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 747 deliberately acting ambiguously (with respect to women, forexample) to keep gossip circulating. Whatever Swift was, or was not, he was not so simple as this reductive premiss makes him out to be. Nor was he more successful than any other complex writer at predicting how his meanings would be construed by others. That no writer can control their own reception is in fact the clear message of the second half of this book, which studies the way in which a succession of Swift's early biographers created his image in respect of his relationships with women, his supposed insanity, his reputation as a comic humourist, and finallyhis patriotism. One does not need to be convinced by the biographical study to find a great deal to enjoy in this book and to learn from it, however. The Jonathan Swift who emerges from Kelly's study is a farcry from the stuffyicon of Augustan' literature that consi? dering him too closely in his English context is sometimes in danger of creating. Her study of the eccentricities of Swift's reception occasionally becomes itself eccentric, as when she reproduces a list of twenty-two ingredients to make a man into a myth taken from a book by Lord Raglan, and earnestly debates how many ofthose Swift (or the Swift story) possesses. (The firsttwo are 'The hero's mother is a royal virgin' and 'his father is a king'?not entirely promising.) Such ideas will nevertheless interest undergraduates, who after reading Kelly's book will be in a position to go on and produce the version of Swift most convincing to themselves in the full awareness that there have been so many others. The book's proof-reading standards are not as high as they should be: variously 'Hester' and 'Esther' Vanhomrigh; 'Baucis and Philomen' throughout; Maecenus; History of the Last Four Years of the Queen; Anthony and Cleopatra; momentomori; Middleton Murry variously as 'Murray' and the correct 'Murry'; Lord Bathhurst. . . and others. Notwithstanding such occasional irritations, this is a stimulating and refreshing book. University of Nottingham Brean S. Hammond Helen Maria Williams and theAge ofRevolution. By Deborah Kennedy. (Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture) Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 276 pp. ?40. ISBN 0-8387-5511-9. Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance. Frances Burney to Jane Austen. By Susan C. Greenfield. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 2002. 227 pp. $34-95- ISBN 0-8143-2992-6. Although very different in scope and approach, Deborah Kennedy's and Susan C. Greenfield's works offerthe reader a thorough panoramic view of the concerns shared by a variety ofwomen writers in the Romantic period, and the differentways in which they rendered them into literature. Their works differin that their respective focus is, in the case of the firstbook under review, a critical study of one writer, Helen Maria Williams, and in the second, an analysis on the topic of family romance in specific novels by six female writers: Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongsof Woman; or,Maria (1798), Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), Amelia Alderson Opie's Adeline Mowbray (1804), and Jane Austen's Emma (1816). Apart from being almost contemporaries, the connec? tions among these women writers were manifold: they could be non-existent (with Jane Austen, for instance); or a matter of coincidence (as occurred in the case of Helen Maria Williams, who?surprisingly enough fora future republican?may have sought 'a position at court like Frances Burney's' (Helen, p. 33); or of mutual admiration and ideological community?as in the case of Helen Maria Williams and Mary 748 Reviews Wollstonecraft (Helen, pp. 76, 88, 165); or even the mere rejection of a fellow woman writer,as Edgeworth herself expressed: 'Miss Williams we did not chuse to go to see though many English do. She is not in any of the societies we are in but sees a vast deal of company. My father I believe will pay her a visit just before we go and he will do the same by Mme de Genlis forsimilar...

The Privatization of Pleasure

Eighteenth-century civil trials for adultery, also known as “criminal conversation” or “crim. con.,” advanced an ethos of sexual propriety that was of a piece with their defense of middle-class property rights. These twin concerns were evident in the trials’ marginalization of the female will and of the servant class. Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman appears to deplore the crim. con. tradition but, structurally and ideologically, has much in common with it.

Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

“Marriage had bastilled… [her] for life.” (154–5) Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria, A Fragment “The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians.” (6...

Mothering daughters: novels and the politics of family romance: Frances Burney to Jane Austen

Lovely Resemblance of her Lovely Mother - Evelina and later Novels Gothic Mothers and Homoerotic Desire - Incestuous Longing in Italian The Maternal Bosom - Sexual Difference and Custody in Wrongs of Woman, or Maria The Maternal Bosom - Sexual and Colonial Difference in Belinda Mother, Daughter, and Mulatto - Women's exchange in Adeline Mowbray The Riddle of Emma - Maternity and the Unconscious.

Skirting around the Sex in Mary Tighe's Psyche

When in 1801 Mary Tighe began composing Psyche; or, The Legend of Love, an epic romance that offers a sensual, often erotic reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, she knew how dangerous articulating sexual passion could be for a woman's literary reputation. 2 As if the history of women's literature lacked sufficient examples, the reception of two recently departed Marys—Wollstonecraft and Robinson—demonstrated how women writers who voice passion do so with peril. Though Wollstonecraft promoted the rational in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) whereas Robinson inscribed the erotic in Sappho and Phaon (1796), both Wollstonecraft and Robinson alike were castigated by conservative critics for unleashing indecorous passions in their writings, whether those passions were political or sexual. Indeed Richard Polwhele's diatribe on The Unsex'd Females (1798) baldly categorized Tighe's contemporaries as good girls or bad girls based on his assessment of their sexual politics. 3 For Polwhele, [End Page 731] Wollstonecraft epitomized the bad seed who enticed other women writers such as Robinson, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, or Ann Yearsley into her "female band despising NATURE's law" by urging them "To blend mental energy with Passion's fire." 4 Good women writers such as Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Anna Seward, Fanny Burney, or Ann Radcliffe resisted Wollstonecraft's infecting "strain" by joining Hannah More's seraphic "train." 5 The stratification of Romantic-era women writers into such camps by Polwhele (and others) made it increasingly difficult for a woman writer to express passion without being consigned to the bad girl camp, "unsex'd" by her critics and therefore unavailable to a larger female constituency who only had access to culturally sanctioned publications. If women writers wanted to be read by the largest possible constituency but wanted to express the passions, was there an acceptable way to make passion manifest? Would they simply adopt the traditional male positioning of the female as the object of desire, or could they dare to show the female as the subject of her own erotic experience, without dire consequences to the female or the writer? Was it conceivable to present a female character in an erotic relationship who is not preparing to take the leap of Leucata (Sappho in Robinson's Sappho and Phaon), finding herself "bastilled" in a madhouse (Maria in Wollstonecraft's Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman [1798]), or discovering herself in league and in love with the devil (Victoria in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya [1806])?

Chastity and transgression in women's writing, 1792-1897: interrupting the Harlot's Progress

Introduction: Interrupting the Harlot's Progress Imagining the Sexualized Heroine: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Feminist Treatise, and The Wrongs of Woman A 'Legion of Wollstonecrafts' 'To Think, To Decide, and to Act': Radical Fictions of Transgressions and Vindication Diverting the Libertine Gaze: Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray Victorian Reclamations: Elizabeth Gaskell's Protective Fictions in Mary Barton and Ruth Rewriting the 'Vile Text': Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Social Reform Reaping the Fruits of Resistance: Josephine Butler and Sarah Grand Writing the New Wollstonecraft Endnotes Works Cited Index

Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: writing lives

Pioneers in life writing, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818 ), are now widely regarded as two of the leading writers of the Romantic period. They are both responsible for opening up new possibilities for women in genres traditionally dominated by men. This volume brings together essays on Wollstonecraft's and Shelley's life writing by some of the most prominent scholars in Canada, Australia, and the United States. It also includes a full-length play by award-winning Canadian playwright Rose Scollard. Together, the essays and the play explore the connections between mother and daughter, between writing and life, and between criticism and creation. They offer a new understanding of two important writers, of a literary period, and of emergent modes of life writing. Essayists include Judith Barbour, Betty T. Bennett, Anne K. Mellor, Charles E. Robinson, Eleanor Ty, and Lisa Vargo. Among the works discussed are Wollstonecraft's Vindication, Letters from Norway, and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman; William Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft; and Shelley's Frankenstein, The Last Man, Ladore, and Rambles in Germany and Italy.

‘FINELY FASHIONED NERVES’ IN MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT'S THE WRONGS OF WOMAN

Journal Article ‘FINELY FASHIONED NERVES’ IN MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT'S THE WRONGS OF WOMAN Get access C. M. RANGER C. M. RANGER University of Essex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 46, Issue 1, March 1999, Pages 27–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/46-1-27 Published: 01 March 1999

Criminal conversation: Mary Wollstonecraft's the wrongs of woman

This article considers Maria's two representations of herself in The Wrongs of Woman: as a sexual subject in her memoir to her daughter, and as a would-be citizen in her letter to the judge. The Wrongs of Woman, although using the novel form, can be taken as the promised second volume of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, on the “partial laws” of England. I argue that it also revises the Vindication's view of feminine sensibility, and experiments with a more radical and generous account of sexuality. Contemporary discourses on which Wollstonecraft drew include popular printed reports of “Trials for Adultery”, especially concerning the civil action known as “Criminal Conversation”.

Placing Jemima: women writers of the 1790s and the eighteenth-century prostitution narrative

When, in Wollstonecraft's novel Wrongs of Woman (1798), the ex-prostitute and prison warder Jemima is moved to tell her story, she speaks out of a long tradition of similar narratives. From at least the 1720s and Defoe's pamphlet Some Considerations upon Streetwalkers (1726), first-person narratives by prostitutes and/or victims of seduction were a standard topos of sentimental literature. In its classic sentimental form, the seduction narrative discovers, and seeks to contain, the prostitute as redeemable victim. During the 1790s, versions of that sentimental reformist narrative are remobilised as part of a renewed interest in the prostitution issue. Writers concerned with women's social and educational status use the numbers of women entering prostitution as an argument for extending employment opportunities. The argument is found in the work of, among others, Wollstonecraft herself, Mary Hays, Priscilla Wakefield and Hannah More. This article places Wollstonecraft's treatment of Jemima - together with stories of “fallen” women in Mary Hays's The Victim of Prejudice (1799), and Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796) - within the context of eighteenth-century reform literature and the narratives it generated. It explores ways in which these self-consciously radical novels of the 1790s rewrite that inherited narrative “tradition”, and negotiate its political implications.

Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Fiction

Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Fiction Daniel Robinson Feminist critics have found it difficult to reconcile Mary Wollstonecraft 's religious faith with her feminist polemic. Nowhere is this difficulty more evident than in her fiction, which is seldom viewed as a means of gauging Wollstonecraft's thought. Wollstonecraft took fiction seriously, however; and it is in her first novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788), and her last, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798), where she most vigorously addresses the opposite poles of her thought. Modern criticism tends to give the impression that The Wrongs of Woman is a superior revision of Mary—that Mary is little more than a rough draft—because the later novel is driven by a didacticism that is consistent with the familiar image of Wollstonecraft as a pioneering feminist. But Mary has ideas as well, though, because of their religious nature, they seem incongruous with the feminist strategy she employs in her last novel. Since the novels are superficially similar in plot and situation, juxtaposition highlights the major difference in philosophic tone: religious thinking abounds in Mary but is conspicuously absent in The Wrongs of Woman. Mary is not merely a work of religious devotion, but a philosophical work on the nature of evil and faith in adversity. Moreover, while The Wrongs of Woman is a feminist polemic that takes up in fiction some of the social issues Wollstonecraft had addressed earlier in A Vindication ofthe Rights ofWoman (1792), Mary is a literary theodicy, in EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 2, January 1997 184 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION which Wollstonecraft addresses contemporary and personal theological concerns. Theodicy attempts to prove the consistency of the notion that (1) there is an omnipotent God (2) who is wholly good and (3) that there is evil and suffering in the world.1 The formula is not syllogistic, and the problem, then, is this: how could God, being omnipotent and wholly good, see and permit evil and suffering? Theodicy seeks a religious or philosophical solution to the problem of evil where Wollstonecraft's later brand of feminism seeks a political solution to problems of social evil. The seeming contradiction between Wollstonecraft's religious faith and her feminist principles is highlighted in the literary theodicy of her first novel. But her fiction also points to the ways in which she would ultimately attempt to resolve the occasional conflict and apparent incongruity in her thinking. The language of theodicy appears in much of Wollstonecraft's writing, and her association of theodicy with the providential themes in her fiction indicates the potential philosophical quandary she finds herself in and seeks to resolve. Wollstonecraft bases her theodicy on providence, her feminism on society, and she explores in her two major works of fiction two very different concerns— theodicy and feminism—that engage her thinking at crucial stages in her writing career. Wollstonecraft eventually abandoned theodicy in favour of a more political approach to social evil, but her early approach to literary theodicy in Mary is itself a proto-feminist move that directs her towards the feminist strategy she adopts in her later writing. Both forces, however, are at work in her novels: Mary reveals some feminist strains of thought in its critique of the condition of women in the late eighteenth century, although its feminism is not as pronounced as in Wollstonecraft's later novel. But what critics have failed to look at closely in the first novel is its providential theme and the difficult religious questions it raises for Wollstonecraft's heroine and for her own intellectual development. For Wollstonecraft, as for most people of her day, providence is a system of events which are perceived as occurring according to the will of God. The problem of evil occurs when the actual occurrence of adversity or suffering appears to conflict with our notions of a benevolent deity. As I will show, this conflict in Wollstonecraft's early writing is resolved through her resignation to providence, so, in this way, providence 1 Dennis Richard Danielson, Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 2. Danielson's book provides a clear definition of theodicy as...

Righting the wrongs of woman: Mary Wollstonecraft'sMaria

(1996). Righting the wrongs of woman: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 19, Writing women/writing power, pp. 413-424.

Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (review)

REVIEWS 393 Eleanor Ty. Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. xvii + 189pp. $40.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8020-2949-3. Eleanor Ty's book does a double service. First, it offers sophisticated discussion of nine novels by late-eighteenth-century authors, most of them largely neglected: Mary Hays (Memoirs of Emma Courtney, The Victim of Prejudice); Elizabeth Inchbald (A Simple Story, Nature and Art); Charlotte Smith (Emmeline, Desmond, The Young Philosopher); Helen Maria Williams (Julia); and Mary Wollstonecraft (The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria). Second, it incorporates into its analysis a lucid application of Lacanian-inspired psycho-linguistic feminist theory, according to which each of these authors, even the most conservative or cautious, "refused" in her own unique way "to comply with the Law of the Father" (p. 155). Each had to do so, Ty maintains, in order to construct a reasonably complete feminine subject or identity; for in the dominant male-centred discourse of the day, woman figured primarily as silent, idealized object. Each accomplished this task by employing her own combination of a cluster of writing strategies—chief among them, double discourse, multivocality, repetition, and literalization—that constitute, for Ty, an alternative eighteenth-century "female aesthetics" (p. xi). Ty's use of Lacanian theory as revised by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva is cautious in one sense, bold in another. It is cautious in that she explains her theories and their terms carefully and uses them sparingly, mainly to shed new light on any feature of a novel that she believes has previously been inadequately understood. Psycho-linguistic theory serves her well, for example, when she undertakes the defence of a tendency in these novelists to construct "idyllic, romantic" endings (p. 112). Ty sees this literary move not as a sign of authorial defeat or retreat from reality but as an artist's strategic decision to "dissociate" herself from the world of aristocratic or parental tyranny, at once corrupt and corrupting, that usually composes the protagonists' larger social environment. Ty's use of theorists is bold, on the other hand, since she refuses to be intimidated by their quarrels with one another. She draws freely on a number of critics interested, as she sees it, in the question of women's relationship to their "mother tongue," combining the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, Nancy Chodorow, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Carol Gilligan with those of Irigaray and Kristeva. This allows Ty maximum flexibility in working through individual novels, although it occasionally causes some confusion about terminology (I counted, for example, at least three discrete meanings for the highly charged term "hysteria" in one chapter and was never quite sure, at any given moment, which one was being used). More often than not, however, Ty offers her readers fresh, clear, and valuable insights. The union between theory and text seems especially happy in the discussion of Inchbald's Nature and Art. riere Ty revises her reader's understandings of characters and plot by discussing them in terms of their proximity to the "patriarchal world or what Lacan calls the symbolic order" (p. 101). Henry and his son, as exiles, are masters of the literal (associated here with maternal and pre-symbolic or "semiotic" discourse); and their literal readings ("massacre" for "war," for example) subvert the euphemistic symbolic rhetoric of the governing authorities. William and his son, on the other hand, are masters of the symbolic code, the Law of the Father; they unwittingly demonstrate the pure, if unintentional, malice ofsuch symbolic abstractions as "poverty" or "woman." The heroine Hannah's victimization within the system—for she is a poor, illiterate young woman— literalizes their abstractions, revealing "how women are 'literally' excluded from the symbolic order and have no access to language" and also how some men "can conceive of woman only as product or commodity" (p. 108). Ty's discussion in this chapter— as in all others—ranges among other relevant points of reference as well. She speculates on genre; she punctuates her discussion with illuminating comparisons, usually to fellow 394 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:4 novelists of the 1890s such as William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and...

Ideology and Self: A Theoretical Discussion of the “Self” in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Fiction

I D E O L O G Y A N D S E L F : A T H E O R E T I C A L D I S C U S S I O N O F T H E “ S E L F ” I N M A R Y W O L L S T O N E C R A F T ’ S F I C T I O N S . D. H A R ASYM University of Alberta She whose sense of her own existence was so intense, who had cried out even in her misery, “ I cannot bear to think of being no more — of losing myself — nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist” , died at the age of thirty-six.1 As Virginia Woolf’s comment and quotation from Wollstonecraft’s letter suggests, Mary Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre from Mary, A Fiction and A Vindi­ cation of the Rights of Woman to Maria or The Wrongs of Woman may be read as a quest for a unified self and presence, to serve as a focal point for her, paradoxically, feminist, yet, monolithic ideology.2 Indeed, presence is a necessary constituent of her attempt to write herself as the true voice of feeling into her fiction and, in so doing, provide a unified subject as a politi­ cal representative for the emancipation of women. Wollstonecraft’s will to explain reinforces presuppositions of an explain­ able universe, a ‘knowing’ subject and a neutral medium of expression — language. Problems necessarily arise from this structural equation (world + subject + language) which are similar to problems written into both Hegel’s and Lacan’s theories of universal language, theories which assimilate femi­ nine difference into masculine sameness.3 Since language consists of conven­ tional structures which pre-exist and prohibit appeals for self-present inten­ tion, the writing process may be read as both an active and a passive pro­ cess. In this configuration, then, as Wollstonecraft attempts to inscribe herself into her displaced, autobiographical, feminine characters, she, too, is written by the text. Held in the act of reading, ordering, and writing her life-narrative, she is not a masterful subject, but an object or an already written supplement.4 Structuralist and deconstructive practices read the self as a linguistically and socially constituted figure, a figure which operates independently of any individual or subjective intention.5 Emile Benveniste in Problèmes de lin­ guistique générale notes that language is a discursive relation involving two figures in a structure of dialogue: “Two figures positioned as partners are E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , xn, 2, June 1986 alternately protagonists of the utterance.” 6 The concepts of self and I are merely figurative words chosen through syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of linguistic structures. For Lacan, the self is a mere symptom of the oppo­ sition of divisiveness and otherness.7 In contrast to viewing the subject as a linguistic intentional construct, Wollstonecraft’s interpreters often conceive of the author’s or character’s self as an essence. The text is the intersection of self and literature.8 Yet, should we assume this phallogocentric9 unity of self and formal neutrality of language (unity and neutrality which exclude feminine difference and both suppress and repress women) when we read Maria or The Wrongs of Woman? Does not this assumption decon­ struct the very tenets of Wollstonecraft’s feminist ideology? In the treatment of the self in Maria or The Wrongs of Woman, there is a sharp contrast between Maria’s first-person autobiographical memories and the third-person narrative discourse which criticizes and censors Maria’s actions, and draws social and political conclusions about the unjust treat­ ment of women. Thus, the memoirs, far from portraying a unified subject and developing as an instruction text for the emancipation of women, dwell in fatalistic melodrama, and eventually usurp the objective discourse of the narrator. In so doing, the memoirs deconstruct the intentions of Wollstone­ craft’s radical idealism and rather than creating a work of fiction which offers a representation of the “new” emancipated...

Reason and Sensibility in Mary Wollstonecraft's "The Wrongs of Woman"

In 1791 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of Rights of Woman, stating that first duty of women was to cultivate and urging them to avoid excessive sensibility. While declaring these sentiments, she knew full well she was opposing a long-established tradition: that belonged to dominant men and sensibility to irrational and subordinate women. As Wollstonecraft uses it in The Rights of Woman, sensibility can be defined as cultivated emotion or capacity for it; it includes spontaneous sympathy and exquisitely polished instinct. Reason is the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth; it is associated with self-restraint and judiciousness.1 In The Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argued that whole person requires strengthening of both and sensibility, so that sensibility might be moderated by reason and be sustained by sensibility; an excess of either relaxes other powers of mind.2 In terms of psychology of day, then, her idea was androgynous, a judicious mingling of male and female sensibility. In Wollstonecraft's view, women pursued sensibility because they had been taught to do so. Female education emphasized nurturing of emotion, so that women would be distorted into sexual and passionate beings and grow subordinate to men (reason must control or moderate sensibility). In The Rights of Woman, term used for a woman successfully educated in this mode is romantic.

The English Jacobin Novel (1780–1805) by Gary Kelly, and: Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

The English Jacobin Novel (1780–1805) by Gary Kelly, and: Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Essays on Politics and Society by John Stuart Mill

written ending, and The Wrongs of Woman was ended arbitrarily by death, before the new promise of life could be shaped into art. So Mary Wollstonecraft failed as a novelist and Dr. Kelly explores the causes of this failure in his masterly introduction. He explains how she failed to reconcile romance with reality, how she was frustrated in turn by religion, romance, and revolution. It was only William Godwin amongst the English Jacobin novelists who could transcend his personal commitment to principle for any sustained act of creative imagination which could fuse personal and public issues in any form of art. But when Mary Wollstonecraft tried to unite philosophy and fiction, experience and politics, she failed to make her novels more than personal or political documents. Yet, in the manner of other English Jacobin novelists, she left a legacy for posterity by bringing a new seriousness to the popular novel; and like Rousseau and the Romantics, she also bequeathed a permanent if imperfect record of an imaginative quest for completeness in life and art. Mary Wollstonecraft’s life and works are closely allied. And although the feminist movement has sparked much interest in her writings, very little comment of any real scholarly or critical value has appeared from the press. Dr. Gary Kelly’s edition fulfills such a need. His Select Bibliography may prove very valuable for future researchers. Long ago, Godwin’s Memoir was published with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Posthumus Works in 1798, and edited, with much additional material, by W. Clark Durant in 1927. Almost half a century later in C. Kegan Paul’s William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries (2 vols., 1876) we find numerous references to other lives and letters of the period. The last serious critical piece was from the pen of Virginia Woolf in The Common Reader (second series). Dr. Kelly mentions some other useful nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographies. But in the end the reader comes to the con­ clusion that Mary Wollstonecraft’s own letters are perhaps her best biog­ raphy, including the valuable Abinger Collection into which Dr. Kelly has dived recently to bring forth some bright pearls. davendra p. varm a / Dalhousie University John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, edited by J. M. Robson, introduction by Alexander Brady (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, r977) • Two volumes, xcv, 780. $60.00 Essays on Politics and Society constitutes Volumes xvm and xrx of the Uni­ versity of Toronto’s Collected Edition of the Works of John Stuart Mill. The 120 edition is a handsome scholarly achievement, though the price will encourage Canadian academics to continue to pocket their patriotism and their sym­ pathy for the sad lot of Canadian publishers and buy books elsewhere. Which, if I am not mistaken, is just what Mill would have done; though it would have pained him to forego Professor Brady’s authoritative, erudite Intro­ duction. Mill is known to humanists mainly for the essay On Liberty, the Auto­ biography, and a variety of essays on literature and related subjects, including those on Coleridge and Bentham to which F. R. Leavis drew particular atten­ tion three decades ago. Of course we recognize that he was also an economist, but I doubt that Canadian humanists approach much closer to the Principles than E. C. Bentley’s pleasant jingle. Yet, as these volumes make clear, he has much to say that is — or should be — pertinent to the concerns of the readers of English Studies in Canada: Canadian professors and humanists, I assume. Together with On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Govern­ ment, the volumes contain essays on political jargon (a forerunner of Orwell’s more pungent piece), on civilization, on the views of De Tocqueville on Democracy in America, on the reform of the civil service, and on various other problems of democratic government. All carry the mark of Mill’s force­ ful logical analysis and his lucid prose style; many deal with principles and problems with which Canada — more than most democracies at the moment, perhaps — needs to be concerned. Canadian academics are indebted to Mill at least to the extent that prin­ ciples stated and analysed in On Liberty were in the minds...

Mary, a Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman. Gary Kelly

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsMary, a Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman. Gary Kelly Diane W. StrommerDiane W. Strommer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 77, Number 1Aug., 1979 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/390917 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright 1979 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access THE ENGLISH JACOBIN NOVEL 1780–1805, by Gary Kelly. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; pp. xi, 291; £10.00. MARY and THE WRONGS OF WOMAN, by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Gary Kelly. London: Oxford University Press, 1976; pp. xxviii, 231; £5.75. KARINA WILLIAMSON KARINA WILLIAMSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume CCXXIII, Issue jun, June 1978, Pages 255–257, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/CCXXIII.197806.255 Published: 01 June 1978

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Carol H. Poston, ed. and Mary Wollstonecraft.Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Carol H. Poston, ed. and Mary Wollstonecraft.Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. Gary Kelly, ed. and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Carol H. Poston, ed. and Mary Wollstonecraft. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Carol H. Poston, ed. and Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. Gary Kelly, ed. and Mary Wollstonecraft.Janet ToddJanet Todd Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 8, Number 3Summer 1977 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24039876 Views: 4Total views on this site © 1977 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.