A Wollstonecraft Anthology

by Janet Todd (Editor)

Mary Wollstonecraft is widely recognized as a social and political thinker of major significance and as one of the most important and influential of the early feminists. Some of her works, such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , have become central texts of feminist thought. Written in the eighteenth century, her social commentary challenged the other eminent thinkers of the day, including Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and confronted the major events of the period, such as the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft was a persuasive writer and thinker who never felt compelled to separate her female experience from her writing.

A Wollstonecraft Anthology brings together the well-known and lesser-known A Vindication of the Rights of Men, The French Revolution, her early educational writings, her letters to Gilbert Imlay and William Godwin, and her reviews of fiction. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of Wollstonecraft's work and includes a biographic introduction by Janet Todd.

269 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 1989

About the author

Janet Todd (Jan) is a novelist, biographer, literary critic and internationally renowned scholar, known for her work on
women’s writing and feminism. Her most recent books include
the novel: Don't You Know There's A War On?;
edition and essay: Jane Austen’s Sanditon;
memoir: Radiation Diaries: Cancer, Memory
and Fragments of a Life in Words;
biography: Aphra Behn: A Secret Life;
the novel: A Man of Genius 2016.
Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden: An Illustrated Novel, forthcoming 2021

A co-founder of the journal Women’s Writing, she has published biographies and critical work on many authors,including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughters, Mary (Shelley) and Fanny (Death And The Maidens) , and the Irish-Republican sympathiser, traveller and medical student, Lady Mount Cashell (Daughters of Ireland).

Born in Wales, Janet Todd grew up in Britain, Bermuda and Ceylon/Sri Lanka and has worked at schools and universities in Ghana, Puerto Rico, India, the US (Douglass College,
Rutgers, Florida), Scotland (Glasgow, Aberdeen) and England (Cambridge, UEA). A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of
Newnham College.