Mary Wollstonecraft Books

Long time fans of the "haunted summer" of 1816 will love this book, out of print but well worth the trouble to track down. The author craftfully uses journals and letters to support a believable and captivating storyline. If you liked the movies on this subject - Gothic, Rowing with the Wind, the (terrible) Frankenstein Unbound, and especially the same-titled 1988 film, you'll love this book.

Dr. Blakmore's analysis of these political writings is very insightful. He uncovers the intertextual conflicts, in particular between Burke and Wollstonecraft, and provides an indepth literary analysis of both. His diction is sofisticated, yet approachable to an average student of 18th Cent. Literature. A must read for anyone interested in the political philosophy of the Age of Englightment.

Mary Wollstonecraft was an excessively unsympathetic character - she was a user( in modern parlance anyway), she manipulated, she was deliberately obstructive and astonishingly naive and yet Tomalin's biography of this most irritating of women kept me completely enthralled from beginning to end. Wollstonecraft certainly was neither deified or demonised here - simply left to tell her own story through her actions.

There is very little quoted material in her, it is pretty much a narrative of her life from childhood through to her death. Tomalin has done enormous research on her life, the pieces tie in together seamlessly.

Wollstonecraft was (of course) the woman who wrote that seminal work on the Rights of Women - and that really seems to be her predominant claim to fame although her lifestyle was very unusual for her times - having open relationships with men (including married men such as the artist Fuseli). I was mostly struck by how little success she really acheived in her lifetime despite her driving attitude to work and enormous energy - it seems although it was all misdirected or perhaps that was a good thing considering her beliefs (odd for her time) and her resentments (numerous and very often unfounded)

Very very enjoyable read.

I loved this book. Mystically it brought me a better understanding of Mary Shelley's life. Unfortunately I was forced to read it in a dusty room in the basement of Cambridge's library because no one has it in stock. The publisher MUST reprint this book because it is an absolute must for all Mary Shelley fans. Don't just stop at Frankenstein, there is so much more grotesque writing of Mary Shelley to experience.

This unfinished story is the product of a fierce feminist and a profound socially-minded author.

It is a biting aggressive work: 'Was not the world a vast prison and women born slaves?'. 'Women, the out-laws of the world'. 'Born a woman - and born to suffer ... I feel more acutely the various ills my sex are fated to bear. I feel that the evils they are subject to endure, degrade them so far below their oppressors, as almost to justify their tyranny.'

One of the author's targets is marriage, 'matrimonial despotism of heart and conduct'.
'But a wife being as much a man's property as his horse, or his ass, she has nothing she can call her own.'
Marriage laws are absurd 'leading to the most insufferable bondage and to a false morality ... which makes that all the virtue of woman consist in chastity, submission, and the forgiveness of injuries'.

Another scandal for the author is 'the enslaved state of the labouring majority ... condemned to labour, like a machine, only to earn bread, and scarcely that'; and 'the evils which arise in society from the despotism of rank and riches.'

This hard hitting story is an outcry for greater freedom (also sexual) for women and for social justice.
It didn't loose its important message and is still very actual in a major part of the world.

Highly recommended.

Muriel Spark is a captivating author in her fiction and takes you into the fascinating world of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Living in a rich period of history, mingling with the likes of Percy Shelley (her husband) and Lord Byron, Mary Shelley's life is incredible. Combined with the elegant writing of Muriel Spark, this is a must for women scholars and period studies. Really very good.

Phy-Olsen's command of Mary Shelley's creative ouvre is magisterial. Not only does she understand Shelley, but there's an over-arching concern that we not accept Mary Shelley as a WOMAN writer, so much as we see her as a creative one. Shelley was, of course, over-shadowed by her far better known husband. But few readers realize that her book, 'that hideous progeny,'Frankenstein, was written on a whim, more or less, during Lord Byon's famous ghost-story writing in 1816. The group effort, which Byron surely though he'd win, is known to us today because only Mary Shelley's work survived. For this alone she deserves remembering, though it was hardly her only effort. Phy-Olsen combines wit, scholarship and a panache for the little-known to make this a compelling and entertaing read. Moreover, she appears not to house, thankfully, a single feminist axe to grind, and in so doing, positions Shelley in the pantheon of writers better than any feminist harridan could have hoped to accomplish.

Wonderfully put together book! Without going into the usual review of a book I'll give you a perspective of mine on the best ways to enjoy it.

If you're one who enjoys sitting outdoors when a light sprinkle of spring rain falls with your favorite wine beside you, this book (she) is perfect.

If you enjoy taking hot baths when no one else is home and relaxing with a good book, this book will make you hit the hot water tap plenty to warm the water again and again.

If you're stuck between classes with nothing else to do until the next one, reading this book will certainly pass the time and you'll appear all the smarter too. Just don't be late for class.

If you're just in the mood to capture what Mary Shelley's voice might have sounded like while reading, by all means, GET THIS BOOK!

I've said it before, she is and will be my favorite authoress of all time, so I am partial to her. She is both underrated and seldom known for more than Frankenstein, however, The Mary Shelley Reader offers up more. Great value and quality in this one.

Ashley Tauchert has brought the best of contemporary feminist scholarship to bear on Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the mothers of feminism. I was fortunate to get a copy of this book just before my own recent biography, "Theodosia Burr Alston: Portrait of a Prodigy" (Corinthian Books, 2002) went to press. Vice President Aaron Burr, for all his flaws, was the first prominent American man to enthusiastically embrace and publicly endorse Wollstonectaft's radical feminist views on the equal education of women. He used her principles to give his teenage daughter, Theodosia, a "man's education" which would equip her for the three roles in life he envisioned for her: queen, president, or empress. Although Tauchert's work deals with the cutting edge of contemporary feminist theory and my own work dealt with how Wollstonecraft's philosophies affected the education of Vice President Aaron Burr's daughter more than a century ago, I found Ms. Tauchert's work extremely insightful and enormously useful in understanding Wollstonecraft herself and the theories she conceptualized which were used to shape Theodosia Burr Alston's life in the mid-to-late 1790s. -- Richard N. Côté

In Mary Wollstonecraft And The Language Of Sensibility, Syndy Conger examines the life and work of a major nineteenth female literary talent whose influence continues to be felt in literature down to the present day. Part One: First Fictions of Sensibility is comprised of Epistolary Revelations; Mary, A Fiction; "Cave of Fancy"; Early Thoughts on Education. Part Two: The Test of Reason presents The Fictions of Sensibility under Analysis; Private and Public Revolutions: Burke as Catalyst; The Rights of Woman and the Wrongs of Sensibility. Part Three: Affirmation and Transformation offers The Test of the Revolution; A New Page in the History of Her Heart; One Last Fiction: Sensibility Imprisoned; and Conclusion: An Ending Without a Resolution. Enhanced with a list of abbreviations, notes, works cited, and a comprehensive index, Mary Wollstonecraft And The Language Of Sensibility is a "must" for Mary Wollstonecraft enthusiasts and students of her work.