Word: wollstonecraft
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LIFE AND DEATH OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT by CLAIRE TOMALIN...
...early wars for women's liberation, even the heroines tended to remain unknown soldiers. Perhaps it was partly the fear of oblivion that made Mary Wollstonecraft sit down late in 1791 and in six weeks write the 300 pages of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Earlier that year, she had broken out of a shell of ladylike anonymity to print a bylined edition of her previously unsigned pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Man. It was a loosely reasoned but passionate answer to Edmund Burke's reservations about the French Revolution. It made Mary Wollstonecraft...
...seems fair to conclude from Claire Tomalin's biography that had Mary Wollstonecraft not stoked herself up for Rights of Women, she would probably have ended up as only a historical footnote: radical editor and translator; wife of Philosopher William Godwin; mother of Mary Godwin, future wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein...
There was a bit of the pathetic patchwork monster about Wollstonecraft herself. Born into a graspy family of weaver-merchants who for several generations had been up and down the economic ladder, she had to pick up her education and her righteous indignation wherever she could find them. Appalled by the strictures of marriage, she attempted to support herself as a governess, then as the head of her own small school. But her temperament, says Biographer Tomalin, "was geared to drama, violent emotion and struggle" without nuance, irony or humor. She was a person who had to dominate people...
Spiritual Partner. Wollstonecraft's first serious love was for a gifted, flamboyant, vain and bisexual painter named Henry Fuseli. The affair was predictably exciting and predictably disastrous, a power struggle that ended in the humiliating scene: Mary begging Fuseli's wife to allow a ménage à trois in which Mary was to be a purely "spiritual partner." Mme. Fuseli was not agreeable. In France, where Mary's fervor for the French Revolution was eventually chilled by the Terror, she fell in love with a flaky American adventurer named Gilbert Imlay; he left her with...