The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (Broché)

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century. She talked and thought on paper : her letters were a large part of the drama of her life. In them we see her grow from an awkward child of fourteen into the pioneering feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and finally into the woman of thirtyeight facing death in childbirth. At different times they reveal her desire to reconcile the irreconcilable : integrity and sexual longing, the needs and duties of a woman, motherhood and intellectual life, fame and domesticity, reason and passion. The letters are occasionally funny, often engaging, and most frequently moving in their vulnerability. Written in cramped lodgings or swaying boats, in the wilds of Scandinavia or in freezing Paris, they form a remarkable autobiographical document, revealing flashes of genius that make compelling reading. This edition contains the complete correspondence of Mary Wollstonecraft, including a recently discovered interchange with the historian Catherine Macaulay and the only known fragments of letters to the Swiss artist Fuseli, with whom Wollstonecraft had a passionate friendship.