THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

by Claire Tomalin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 1974

This is the second biography of that remarkable woman to appear recently (cf. Eleanor Flexner's Mary Wollstonecraft, 1972) and happily for us, Tomalin matches Flexner both in her range of scholarship and her empathy for her subject, though her interpretations of the events in Mary's difficult, courageous life sometimes differ. Certainly Tomalin recognizes the tremendous importance of the English Dissenters to Mary's development. Beginning with the publisher Joseph Johnson who set her up in St. Paul's Churchyard and gave her employment writing and translating, the London Radicals of the 1790's -- Dr. Price, Joseph Priestley, Tom Paine and William Blake among them -- sustained her and encouraged her intellectual adventurousness. But for them she might well have remained a frustrated governess emotionally and mentally stagnant. Once she had acquired some measure of independence and freedom from her demanding family, Mary kept on going, learning, as Tomalin puts it, ""the courage of her anger,"" becoming increasingly sure that the restrictions and deprivations she had suffered in early life were the result of her sex -- until finally, with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman there erupted ""thirty years of rage distilled in six weeks' hard labor."" Like Flexner, Tomalin sees the painful discrepancies between Mary's professed views on sex and marriage and her tortured personal relations with the American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, who fathered her first child in revolutionary Pards. But unlike Flexner, Tomalin is not especially sanguine about the relationship with William Godwin; she sees it less as a final fulfillment and domestic happiness for Mary than as ""a consolation prize of a superior kind,"" suggesting that these two -- for all their mutual respect -- had little in common. Since Mary died in childbirth only a few months after the marriage to Godwin this must remain something of a moot point. What is indisputable is the passion of her struggle for emancipation in a world that wouldn't see her equal for daring and determination for another hundred years.

Pub Date: Oct. 9, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1974

Categories: NONFICTION