The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft

Description

Once viewed solely in relation to the history of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft is now recognised as a writer of formidable talent across a range of genres, including journalism, letters and travel writing, and is increasingly understood as an heir to eighteenth-century literary and political traditions as well as a forebear of romanticism. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft is the first collected volume to address all aspects of Wollstonecraft's momentous and tragically brief career. The diverse and searching essays commissioned for this volume do justice to Wollstonecraft's pivotal importance in her own time and since, paying attention not only to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also to the full range of her work across disciplinary boundaries separating philosophy, letters, education, advice, politics, history, religion, sexuality, and feminism itself. A chronology and bibliography offer further essential information for scholars and students of this remarkable writer.

Claudia L. Johnson is Professor of English at Princeton University. She is author of Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (1988) and Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995), and is currently working on Raising the Novel, which explores the history of novel studies and canon making from the late eighteenth century until the 1950s, and Jane Austen: Cults and Cultures, which examines the history of Austenian reception, representation, and memorialization as well as her place in the formation of various cultural, national, and even sexual identities.

'This is a valuable addition to Wollstonecraft studies, which will also be of interest to scholars of sensibility ...'. Susan Manly, University of St Andrews, Bars Bulletin & Review