Posthumous Works: of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

By Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Shelley (née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, often known as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, travel writer, and editor of the works of her husband, Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was the daughter of the political philosopher William Godwin and the writer, philosopher, and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Shelley was taken seriously as a writer in her own lifetime, though reviewers often missed the political edge to her novels. After her death, however, she was chiefly remembered only as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein. It was not until 1989, when Emily Sunstein published her prizewinning biography Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, that a full-length scholarly biography analyzing all of Shelley's letters, journals, and works within their historical context was published.

The well-meaning attempts of Mary Shelley's son and daughter-in-law to "Victorianise" her memory through the censoring of letters and biographical material contributed to a perception of Mary Shelley as a more conventional, less reformist figure than her works suggest. Her own timid omissions from Percy Shelley's works and her quiet avoidance of public controversy in the later years of her life added to this impression.

The eclipse of Mary Shelley's reputation as a novelist and biographer meant that, until the last thirty years, most of her works remained out of print, obstructing a larger view of her achievement. She was seen as a one-novel author, if that. In recent decades, however, the republication of almost all her writings has stimulated a new recognition of its value. Her voracious reading habits and intensive study, revealed in her journals and letters and reflected in her works, is now better appreciated. Shelley's recognition of herself as an author has also been recognized; after Percy's death, she wrote about her authorial ambitions: "I think that I can maintain myself, and there is something inspiriting in the idea". Scholars now consider Mary Shelley to be a major Romantic figure, significant for her literary achievement and her political voice as a woman and a liberal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Classics
• Release date: Apr 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781609778859

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and feminist. Born in London, Wollstonecraft was raised in a financially unstable family. As a young woman, she became friends with Jane Arden, an intellectual and socialite, and Fanny Blood, a talented illustrator and passionate educator. After several years on her own, Wollstonecraft returned home in 1780 to care for her dying mother, after which she moved in with the Blood family and began planning live independently with Fanny. Their plan proved financially impossible, however, and Fanny soon married and moved to Portugal, where, in 1785, she died from complications of pregnancy. This inspired Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), launching her career as one of eighteenth-century England’s leading literary voices. In 1790, in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Men, a political pamphlet defending the cause of the French Revolution, advocating for republicanism, and illustrating the ideals of England’s emerging middle class. Following the success of her pamphlet, Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a groundbreaking work of political philosophy and an early feminist text that argues for the education of women as well as for the need to recognize them as rational, independent beings. The same year, Wollstonecraft travelled to France, where she lived for a year while moving in Girondist circles and observing the changes enacted by the newly established National Assembly. In 1793, she was forced to leave France as the Jacobins rose to power, executing many of Wollstonecraft’s friends and colleagues and expelling foreigners from the country. In 1797, she married the novelist and anarchist philosopher William Godwin, with whom she bore her daughter Mary, who would eventually write the novel Frankenstein (1818). Several days afterward, however, Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38 from septicemia, leaving a legacy as a pioneering feminist and unparalleled figure in English literature.

Reviews for Posthumous Works

[wonderperson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Apart from Class ridden snobbery condemming working classes to manual work and paying attention to current social mores, Wollestonecraft makes a reasoned case for women to shove off the fripperies of womanhood and get into some solid educational DIY.
Her thesis is a woman is a better wife etc if she is educated rather than an uneducated bimbo who is more concerned with the latest fashion than by the state of her brain. I think this holds true.
Well worth reading, well written and an easy read in comparison to other philosophy texts.

[estellechauvelin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a valuable tool for understanding late 18th century thought, and how a real live woman ahead of her time framed her opinions on the rights and education of women long before modern feminism.

[ariadnearanea · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mary Wollstonecraft is often credited with being the world’s first feminist. That may be something of an exaggeration, but her 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is certainly renowned as the earliest, most powerful, most overtly feminist tract in the English language – despite having been written long before the word “feminism” was coined.The dense wordy style of an eighteenth century political tract is easily enough to put off the majority of modern readers, but – for the brave or committed reader – this work more than repays the effort required. Indeed, what struck me is how much of what Wollstonecraft says in A Vindication resounds in the modern world.Her argument (addressed primarily to the position of middle-class women) is that a lack of effective and appropriate education, and a distorted view of women’s purpose in life, have combined to render many or most women weak, foolish, vain, selfish, cunning and unfit for what Wollstonecraft sees as their peculiar (but not primary) duty – that of motherhood.[Aside: much to my satisfaction, there are a number of pro-breastfeeding remarks in A Vindication, and Wollstonecraft repeatedly makes the point that beauty requirements and other foolish demands on women make them averse to breastfeeding with potentially disastrous consequences!]She argues powerfully that society (by which she means, primarily, men – since they have all the education and the political and economic power) fails women in a number of ways.For one thing, it makes them utterly dependent financially on men – fathers, husbands, brothers or other relatives. The effect is that for self-preservation women must adopt a subservient, self-abasing attitude to men. This degrades them twice: once in dignity; and then (which makes me think of Dickens’ Uriah Heep!) by forcing them to use cunning – those famous “womanly wiles” – to get what they want or need but cannot obtain for themselves.Secondly, society assigns to women an obligation to please men, and to be pleasing to them. This springs in part from their aforementioned dependence on men, and is reinforced by the fact that precious little other outlet is given them for their emotions and ambitions. The consequence is that women, being admired far more for their persons than for their minds, expend all their care and effort on the former at the expense of the latter. They become vain, and bitchy, and obsessed with “beauty”, by which they mean weak delicate bodies decorated in whatever ornaments are currently in fashion.More than all this, what women suffer is a total lack of any education worth the name. It is their want of a proper education which narrows their horizons and reinforces both their dependence on men and their inordinate concern for petty things such as their dress or (by outward show, if not in practice) maintenance of the one virtue that no woman must be without – chastity.Such women as this, Wollstonecraft argues, inevitably become hopelessly caught up in “vice” – vanity and cupidity if nothing else – and will inevitably lack any real virtue such as genuine chastity, proper affection, loyalty or generosity, selfless friendship, or sound understanding. Moreover, such women as this will also invariably either neglect their children in favour of pursuing the “necessary” activity of continuing to please men by maintaining their beauty and other charms – or they will devote themselves excessively to their children but, because they lack both judgement and sound understanding, they will be unable to respond to their children properly and thus will risk spoiling either their health or their tempers, perhaps irremediably. In either case, such a woman as this will be unable to carry out her peculiar (but not primary) duty: to bring up children who are healthy, happy, well-behaved and suitably educated.Wollstonecraft’s primary aims in A Vindication are twofold.Firstly, she endeavours to sweep away the lingering idea – by making clear how nonsensical and self-contradictory it is – that Woman was made by God to be a plaything and propagator for Man, and that she has no true rationality or personhood of her own.Secondy, she makes a strident plea for proper education for women. If women were given a level playing field and still fell behind men, she says, it would be appropriate to charge them with inferiority. Unless and until that happens, she insists that no man can prove women inferior. But, she says, even if we believe that women are in some way less than men, they are still human beings, still rational creatures, and still (as she says) given an immortal soul which it is their sacred duty to expand and develop. It is wrong for women to be oppressed and prevented from meeting this sacred duty, merely because of an (unproved!) idea that women will or may not actually achieve their aim in the same degree as men. Indeed, if that were not argument enough, it should be remembered that failing to educate women properly will prevent them from meeting their secondary duty – that of mothering – because it renders them unfit for the job.In short: Women are Human! and Education for All!More than that, Wollstonecraft anticiaptes, by around two centuries, a surprising number of modern feminist ideas. Women as sex class? The beauty myth? Socially constructed gender roles? The seeds of all these ideas and more can be found in A Vindication. Wollstonecraft even suggests – although tentatively, aware of the response that she would get for it – that perhaps women might at some point have a legitimate claim to taking some part in the government of their country. So we can credit her with “Votes for Women!” too.Superb.

[anoceandrowning · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was simultaneously brilliant and saddening. I didn’t expect these words to resonate quite as much as they did. I didn’t expect to be able to immediately apply them to my life. I was looking for a historical perspective, some sign that we are headed in the right direction.We are. At least, I think so. Unfortunately, those steps we have taken don’t seem as dramatic anymore. I mean, women can vote. They can run for office. They have been liberated from traditional sexual confines. They can take pride in just being.One of Wollstonecraft's biggest arguments was that women are socialized to appeal to men at their own expense. They don’t exercise their own wills or minds except for in a very limited sense. Where are they left when the passion dies? They are incapable of commanding respect or friendship. The best they can hope for is to be treated as lovely, mindless things whose sole purpose for existence is to satisfy the whims of the more dominant sex, which, after their mates have become habituated to their presence, is impossible.Popular culture still surrounds us with the idea that women need to be beautiful, that everything else is somehow secondary. It is important to be well dressed, to be thin. It bothers me that these words, so eloquently written so long go, have not prompted us to change the way we bring up our children. Beauty isn’t everything. Love isn’t everything. Relationships are not everything. We have to refine ourselves in order to refine our culture.

[seldombites · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book is way too hard to read. It is reputed to be one of the most important books ever written, but I simply could not get through it. The language is extremely convoluted and reads as though it has been written for the chardonnay set. It would be difficult for the average layperson to read. I have been reading this book for months and I am not even half-way through. I think now is the time to give up!

[madamejeanie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Julia Callahan Garrity (known to her friends as Callahan and to her family as "Jules") left the Atlanta Police Department 10 years ago when she was denied a promotion to Homicide Detective. Turning her back on the "glass ceiling" Callahan bought a cleaning business called The House Mouse and picked up a license to be a private investigator on the side. Over the years, she's relied heavily on her former partner and best friend Bucky Deavors (who got that promotion she was denied), for information on various cases, so when he invites her to a St. Patrick's Day party at a local bar, she can't say no. But the evening ends abruptly when Bucky is shot during an apparent liquor store robbery while they're on the way home. Callahan is devastated, and the talk that perhaps Bucky was a "dirty cop" only intensifies her pain. It doesn't help matters any when she learns that her long-time lover, Mac MacAuliff, is about to take a job in Nashville, and wants Callahan to drop everything, sell both her businesses, and move away with him. With her entire life in turmoil, she is determined to find the person responsible for shooting Bucky and clear her friend's name, and with the sometimes outrageous help of her "Mice", she swears she will pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding an Irish fraternal police organization if it's the last thing she ever does. But she's up against a nameless, faceless enemy and the bad guys could be anywhere. She no longer knows who to trust on the Atlanta PD, and her enemies are watching her every move while brewing up something far more lethal than a mug of green beer.I really hate to see this series end. It's got everything I like in a mystery series: great characters, twisted plot lines, moments of sheer hilarity, and others that tug at your heart. But, this book was written in 2000 and nary another one since, in this series anyway. This one had an epilogue that attempted to tie up assorted loose ends and deliver everything with a nice bow on top, but it didn't satisfy me. I would far rather imagine that Callahan and her iron-willed, deeply Southern mother Edna, are still handling the day to day mundane business of cleaning houses along with Neva Jean, Ruby, Cheezer, and the most unforgettable pair of sisters I've ever run across, Baby and Sister Easterbrooks, both in their 80s, and ready for anything. I do recommend this series.