Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life

I had the pleasure of reading this book while doing research for my biography, "Theodosia Burr Alston: Portrait of a Prodigy" (Corinthian Books, September 2002). Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects" (London: J. Johnson, 1792) had a profound influence on U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr, who became one of her earliest and most influential supporters in the United States. He immediately embraced Wollstonecraft's concepts of equal education and incorporated them into creating, through his teenage daughter, Theodosia, his model for the ultimate woman of the future: an exotic new intellectual hybrid embodying the education of a man with the natural qualities of a woman who possesses both the ability to reason -- and a soul (!!). Janet Todd's insightful telling of Wollstonecraft's life and her careful explanation of how Wollstonecraft's credo developed was both enlightening and enormously instructive. Todd's clear writing style makes her subject come alive. As a scholar writing a biography of Aaron Burr's daughter, I bought this book and read it because I had to. But I was so delighted with it that I then went back and re-read it because I WANTED to!

This is a very good book. It is based on comprehensive research, extremely detailed, well written and sensitive. It is the best biography of Mary Wollstoencraft ever written and will remain so for a long time.The really curious thing that comes through is that Wollstonecraft was less of a feminist than one might think. In fact she was an intelligent, sensitive, somewhat high-handed and dominant, woman. Her dearest wish in life was to find a man worthy of her; her dearest fear, to be abandoned by him.At the time she wrote her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was thirty years old and a virgin. The volume drips with contempt for women less talented, and less chaste, than herself. This is what makes her interesting; she is a textbook-case. Is it possible that with her, as with so many others, feminism at bottom is simply an attempt by women who do not have a man to avenge themselves on those who do?

I truly enjoyed this book, as I had to read it for a paper. It tells of Mary Wollstonecraft and her travels, focusing mostly of life after A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman becuase it is heavily documented. This is not a simple book. I found myself going to the dictionary a lot but those words help in the showing of this book as an intelligent piece of work. Janet Todd has gone into a lot of detail when describing Wollstonecraft's life. If it described more, we'd be reading about how she held her fork and what exactly the bread looked like. Thoses details paint a more brilliant picture of MW than expected but can make the book move slowly. So much information is packed into the pages making the book a bit hard to swallow all at once.I sincerely recommend reading the book in more than one sitting.