Vindication (85 page)
Authors: Lyndall Gordon
RELATIONSHIPS: female friendships,
see
Arden (Jane), Barlow (Ruth), Blood (Fanny), Hays (Mary), King (Margaret); love affairs,
see
Godwin (William), Imlay (Gilbert); male friendships,
see
Fuseli (Henry), Godwin (William), Hewlett (Revd John), Johnson (Joseph), Ogle (George), Price (Dr Richard)
WORKS: âThe Cave of Fancy';
Education of Daughters
;
Elements of Morality
(translation);
The Female Reader
;
Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution
; âLessons' for Fanny;
Letters
(with some redating); âLetters from the Revolution'; âLetters on the Management of Infants';
Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman
;
Mary
;
On the Importance of Religious Opinions
(translation);
Original Stories from Real Life
;
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
;
Travels
(
A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
);
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
;
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
;
Wrongs of Woman
(link with
Frankenstein
)
Wollstonecraft, Mary (American sister-in-law of MW)
Woman's nature; desires; independence and reason .
Woolf, Leonard
Woolf, Virginia : counter-history; great-grandmother (see Anne Stent); married life; on MW; publication; on the âtrue nature of woman'
Wordsworth, Dorothy
Wordsworth, William: flight from France; âmusic of humanity';
Prelude
; publication; quoted; spied upon; âspirit'
World Anti-Slavery Convention (1840)
Wulfsberg, Jacob: career; character; defence lawyers' objection to; judge appointed by Royal Commission; indignation at corrupt lawyers; meeting with MW; relationship with Backman; support for MW
Â
Young, Arthur
Young, Edward
Â
Zannetti, Ferdinando
Zannetti (music master)
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, L
YNDALL
G
ORDON
is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James. Her work has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography and the Cheltenham Prize for Literature. She has also published a memoir,
Shared Lives,
about growing up in South Africa in the 1950s. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Senior Research Fellow at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. She lives in Oxford.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
RAISE
F
OR
Vindication
“[An] imaginative and intelligent, consistently absorbing reinterpretation of Mary Wollstonecraftâ¦. [Gordon] speculates and probes with a freewheeling intelligence that responds to Wollstonecraft's own.”
â
New York Review of Books
“Gordon relates Wollstonecraft's story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personifiedâ¦. [She] tackles this formidable woman with grace, clarity, and much new researchâ¦. Wonderful, and deeply soberingâ¦. Gordon's book is worthy of its subject.”
â
New York Times Book Review
“Fierce and wonderfulâ¦. Lyndall Gordon glides on silver oars over the deep waters of English lit, dipping here into letters, there into polemic, yonder a novel or a memoir. She seems to have moved into Mary's apartments, even to have put on her skin. But she is also reading her as a dazzling character on the brilliant page.”
âJohn Leonard,
Harper's
“The tedious question thrown at biographersââDo we need another book aboutâ¦?'âis demolished by Gordon's adventurous scholarshipâ¦. [Her] fresh approach places this early feminist in the context of the American and French Revolutionsâ¦. [An] exhaustively researched biography.”
âBrenda Maddox,
Washington Post Book World
“One of the many triumphs of Gordon's biography is that it makes Wollstonecraft's emerging life of the mind every bit as thrilling as her belatedly tumultuous life of the bodyâ¦. A captivating portrait not of a strident feminist nor a bluestocking but, as Gordon asserts, a rational and vulnerable visionary who had the courage to try to map out, in her work and in her life, a blueprint for human change.”
â
Fresh Air
, National Public Radio
“Exceptional, emotionally overwhelmingâ¦. A 360-degree exploration of Wollstonecraft in her eraâand beyond. To [Gordon], Wollstonecraft âwas not a born genius; she became one.' What interests Gordon is how she did so and at what cost, to herself and to others.”
â
Newsday
“Gordon offers fresh detail and insightâ¦. [She] succeeds admirably in showing readers how this independent, compassionate woman who devised a blueprint for human change achieved that distinctionâ¦. Deeply documented with Wollstonecraft's writing, contemporary memoirs, letters, and archival materials, Gordon's biography is eminently readable and rewarding.”
â
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“[A] vigorous biographyâ¦. Gordon has brought the good-hearted, deeply insightful Wollstonecraft forward into the greater light she deserves.”
â
Tennessean
“A sobering and inspirational read for women today. Readers who delve into it will meet a brave, visionary woman they are not likely to forget.”
â
Richmond Times Dispatch
“In the hands of this seasoned biographer, Mary Wollstonecraft is a better character, more rounded and complexâ¦. Thanks to Lyndall Gordon's illuminating book, it should be a long time before Wollstonecraft next slips into darkness.”
â
Times Literary Supplement
“Rich with new interpretations, sources, and detailâ¦. Captures the drama of Wollstonecraft's life.”
â
Library Journal
(starred review)
“Gordon shows how the supposedly worst aspects of her subject are inseparable from the bestâ¦. [Wollstonecraft's] aspirations to greatness, and her desire to make herself known, keep breaking through Ms. Gordon's wonderfully wrought book like flashes of lightning.”
â
New York Sun
“A riveting page-turnerâ¦. The reader is drawn directly into Wollstonecraft's struggleâ¦. From this beautifully written book, Wollstonecraft emerges as a triumphant success, despite all adversity and slights of fateâ¦. Gordon's biographical method is exciting.”
â
The Times
(London)
“An outstanding, rigorously researched intellectual biography.”
â
Kirkus Reviews
T. S. ELIOT: AN IMPERFECT LIFE
VIRGINIA WOOLF: A WRITER'S LIFE
SHARED LIVES (A MEMOIR)
CHARLOTTE BRONTÃ: A PASSIONATE LIFE
A PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY JAMES:
TWO WOMEN AND HIS ART
VINDICATION
. Copyright © 2005 by Lyndall Gordon. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition JUNE 2007 ISBN: 9780061866005
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*
There are no numbered notes. For the reader who wants to know more, the source notes, starting on p. 456, contain additional material on contexts and issues.
*
An undergraduate who received an allowance from the college, enabling him to study. A sizar used to perform certain duties now performed by college servants.
*
Ballet, developed in the eighteenth century, retains that lift of the diaphragm and tightened hips, setting off the carriage of head and arms.
*
In Roman law it was illegal:
nullum sine dote fiat conjugium
(let no marriage be made without a dowry). If the bride's family could not pay the groom, the marriage could not take place, and previous understandings were nullified. Olwyn Hufton,
The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500â1800
(1997).
*
This would now be diagnosed as postpartum depression, but the label belies continued ignorance about this condition. Most cases would recover, but not all: for instance, in the 1840s Thackeray's wife fell into depression after the birth of her second child, and remained in an asylum for the rest of her life.
*
In truth, Lord Mansfield had been a protector of property and no friend to slaves. He had intended his ruling in favour of freedom in the case of one man (who actively opposed his enslavement on British soil) to have no repercussions for slavery in general, but many slaves had taken the following judgement as a cue to leave their owners: âno Master ever was allowed here to take a Slave by force to be sold abroad, because he had deserted from his Service, or for any other Reason whatever; we cannot say the Cause set forth by this Return [of a man to slavery] is allowed or approved of by the Laws of this Kingdomâ¦'.
*
Jane Austen too was less than submissive to Fordyce. His
Sermons to Young Women
is the book Mr Collins insists on reading aloud to the Bennet girls in
Pride and Prejudice
.
*
College in the sense of a resident community. A dated stone says August 1780, but construction had begun well before.
*
Caroline inherited her lands in 1761 at the age of seven, from her King grandfather through her mother Margaret, who died in 1763. Margaret had been the daughter and heiress of James, Lord Kingston of Mitchelstown Castle. Caroline's father was Colonel the Right Hon. Richard FitzGerald of Mount Offaly, Co. Kildare. She was mistress of her lands for her lifetime, after which they were to go to her eldest son.
*
According to her real rather than fudged birth date, Margaret would actually have been a year older, fifteen to sixteen.
*
Hamlet
, I, v, 96-7: ââ¦while memory holds a seat/ In this distracted globe'.
*
Surnames only are used for male writers, while females are identified by the prefix âMiss' or âMrs' or âLadyââWollstonecraft resists this identification for herself: she gives her surname alone in the list of contents, and âM. Wollstonecraft' elsewhere for extracts from her
Education
. Her extracts from
Real Life
remain anonymous. She does not draw on
Mary
, and I've wondered if Johnson ruled it out as too subversive for schoolgirls.
*
'Mrs' was an honorary title, assumed when a woman passed marrying age or, as in this case, had made up her mind not to marry.
*
Congress partly repaired the wrong some years later by giving the remnant of the colony a tract of 24,000 acres on the Ohio, known as the âFrench grant' or Gallipolis. When Constantin Volney visited in 1796 he found only about eighty sallow, thin, sickly remnants of the six hundred settlers.