List of
works
This is a
complete list of Mary Wollstonecraft's works; all works are the first edition
and were authored by Wollstonecraft unless otherwise noted:
·
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters:
With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life. London: Joseph Johnson, 1787.
·
Mary: A Fiction. London: Joseph Johnson,
1788.
·
Original Stories from Real
Life: With Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the
Mind to Truth and Goodness. London: Joseph Johnson, 1788.
·
Necker, Jacques. Of the
Importance of Religious Opinions. Transated
by Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Joseph Johnson, 1788.
·
The Female Reader: Or,
Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse; selected from the best writers, and
disposed under proper heads; for the improvement of young women. By Mr. Cresswick, teacher of
elocution [Mary Wollstonecraft]. To which is prefixed a preface, containing
some hints on female education. London: Joseph Johnson, 1789.
·
de Cambon, Maria Geertruida van
de Werken. Young
Grandison. A Series of Letters from
Young Persons to Their Friends. Translated by Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Joseph
Johnson, 1790.
·
Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf. Elements
of Morality, for the Use of Children;
with an introductory address to parents. Translated
by Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790.
·
A Vindication of the Rights of
Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. London:
Joseph Johnson, 1790.
·
A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects. London:
Joseph Johnson, 1792.
·
"On the Prevailing
Opinion of a Sexual Character in Women, with Strictures on Dr. Gregory's Legacy
to His Daughters". New Annual Register
(1792): 457–466. [From Rights of Woman]
·
An Historical and Moral View
of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has produced in Europe. London: Joseph Johnson,
1794.
·
Letters Written during a Short
Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. London: Joseph Johnson, 1796.
·
"On Poetry, and Our
Relish for the Beauties of Nature". Monthly Magazine (April
1797).
·
The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed.
William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously;
unfinished]
·
"The Cave of Fancy".
Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London:
Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously; fragment written in 1787]
·
"Letter on the Present
Character of the French Nation". Posthumous Works of the Author of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798.
[Published posthumously; written in 1793]
·
"Fragment of Letters on
the Management of Infants". Posthumous Works of the Author of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London:
Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously; unfinished]
·
"Lessons". Posthumous
Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed.
William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously;
unfinished]
·
"Hints". Posthumous
Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London:
Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously; notes on the second volume of Rights
of Woman, never written]
·
Contributions to the Analytical
Review (1788–1797) [published anonymously]
Major works
The majority of
Wollstonecraft's early productions centre around the topic of education; she
assembled an anthology of literary extracts "for the improvement of young
women" entitled The Female Reader and she translated two children's
works, Maria Geertruida van de Werken de Cambon's Young Grandison and Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's
Elements of Morality. Her own writings also addressed the topic. In both
her conduct book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and
her children's book Original Stories
from Real Life (1788), Wollstonecraft advocates educating children
into the emerging middle-class ethos: self-discipline,
honesty, frugality, and social contentment. Both books also emphasize the
importance of teaching children to reason, revealing Wollstonecraft's
intellectual debt to the important seventeenth-century educational philosopher John Locke. However, the prominence she affords religious
faith and innate feeling distinguishes her work from his and links it to the
discourse of sensibility popular at the end of the
eighteenth century. Both texts also advocate the education of women, a
controversial topic at the time and one which she would return to throughout
her career, most notably in A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft argues that well-educated
women will be good wives and mothers and ultimately contribute positively to
the nation.
Vindication
of the Rights of Men (1790): Published
in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790), which was a defence of constitutional monarchy,
aristocracy, and the Church of England,
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. Hers was the first response in a pamphlet war
that subsequently became known as the Revolution Controversy,
in which Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1792) became the rallying cry for reformers
and radicals.
Wollstonecraft not only attacked monarchy and
hereditary privilege but also the language that Burke used to defend and
elevate it. In a famous passage in the Reflections, Burke had lamented:
"I had thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards
to avenge even a look that threatened her [Marie Antoinette] with insult.—But the age of chivalry is gone."
Most of Burke's detractors deplored what they viewed as theatrical pity for the
French queen—a pity they felt was at the expense of the people. Wollstonecraft
was unique in her attack on Burke's gendered language. By redefining the sublime and the beautiful,
terms first established by Burke himself in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1756), she undermined his rhetoric as well as his
argument. Burke had associated the beautiful with weakness and femininity and
the sublime with strength and masculinity; Wollstonecraft turns these
definitions against him, arguing that his theatrical tableaux turn
Burke's readers—the citizens—into weak women who are swayed by show. In her
first unabashedly feminist critique, which Wollstonecraft
scholar Claudia L. Johnson
argues remains unsurpassed in its argumentative force, Wollstonecraft indicts
Burke's defence of an unequal society founded on the passivity of women.
In her arguments for republican virtue, Wollstonecraft
invokes an emerging middle-class ethos in opposition to what she views as the
vice-ridden aristocratic code of manners. Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers,
she believed in progress and derides Burke for relying on tradition and custom.
She argues for rationality, pointing out that Burke's system would lead to the
continuation of slavery, simply because it had been an ancestral tradition.
She describes an idyllic country life in which each family can have a farm that
will just suit its needs. Wollstonecraft contrasts her utopian
picture of society, drawn with what she says is genuine feeling, to Burke's
false feeling.
The Rights of Men was Wollstonecraft's first
overtly political work, as well as her first feminist work; as Johnson
contends, "it seems that in the act of writing the later portions of Rights
of Men she discovered the subject that would preoccupy her for the rest of
her career". It was this text that made her a well-known writer.
Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792): A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft argues that women
ought to have an education commensurate with their
position in society and then proceeds to redefine that position, claiming that
women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because
they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives.
Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in
marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the
same fundamental rights as men. Large sections of the Rights of Woman
respond vitriolically to conduct book writers such as James Fordyce and John Gregory and
educational philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who
wanted to deny women an education. (Rousseau famously argues in Émile (1762) that
women should be educated for the pleasure of men.)
Wollstonecraft states that currently many women are
silly and superficial (she refers to them, for example, as "spaniels"
and "toys"), but argues that this is not because of an innate
deficiency of mind but rather because men have denied them access to education.
Wollstonecraft is intent on illustrating the limitations that women's deficient
educations have placed on them; she writes: "Taught from their infancy
that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and,
roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison." She implies
that, without the encouragement young women receive from an early age to focus
their attention on beauty and outward accomplishments, women could achieve much
more.
While Wollstonecraft does call for equality between
the sexes in particular areas of life, such as morality, she does not
explicitly state that men and women are equal. What she does claim is that men
and women are equal in the eyes of God. However, such claims of equality stand
in contrast to her statements respecting the superiority of masculine strength
and valour. Wollstonecraft famously and ambiguously writes: "Let it not be
concluded that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted,
that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by
Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the
whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues
should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has
only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequentially, as
strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, as that there is
a God."[ Her ambiguous statements regarding the equality of the
sexes have since made it difficult to classify Wollstonecraft as a modern
feminist, particularly since the word and the concept were unavailable to her.
One of Wollstonecraft's most scathing critiques in the
Rights of Woman is of false and excessive sensibility, particularly in women. She argues that women who
succumb to sensibility are "blown about by every momentary gust of
feeling" and because they are "the prey of their senses" they
cannot think rationally. In fact, she claims, they do harm not only to
themselves but to the entire civilization: these are not women who can help
refine a civilization—a popular eighteenth-century idea—but women who will
destroy it. Wollstonecraft does not argue that reason and feeling should act
independently of each other; rather, she believes that they should inform each
other.
In addition to her larger philosophical arguments,
Wollstonecraft also lays out a specific educational plan. In the twelfth
chapter of the Rights of Woman, "On National Education", she
argues that all children should be sent to a "country day school" as
well as given some education at home "to inspire a love of home and
domestic pleasures." She also maintains that schooling should be co-educational, arguing that men and women, whose marriages
are "the cement of society", should be "educated after the same
model."
Wollstonecraft addresses her text to the middle-class,
which she describes as the "most natural state", and in many ways the
Rights of Woman is inflected by a bourgeois view of the world. It encourages modesty and
industry in its readers and attacks the uselessness of the aristocracy. But
Wollstonecraft is not necessarily a friend to the poor; for example, in her
national plan for education, she suggests that, after the age of nine, the
poor, except for those who are brilliant, should be separated from the rich and
taught in another school.
Both of Wollstonecraft's novels
criticize what she viewed as the patriarchal institution of marriage and its deleterious
effects on women. In her first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), the eponymous heroine
is forced into a loveless marriage for economic reasons; she fulfils her desire
for love and affection outside of marriage with two passionate romantic friendships, one
with a woman and one with a man. Maria: or, The Wrongs
of Woman (1798), an unfinished novel published posthumously and
often considered Wollstonecraft's most radical feminist work, revolves around the story of a woman
imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband; like Mary, Maria also finds
fulfilment outside of marriage, in an affair with a fellow inmate and a
friendship with one of her keepers. Neither of Wollstonecraft's novels depict
successful marriages, although she posits such relationships in the Rights
of Woman. At the end of Mary, the heroine believes she is going
"to that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in
marriage," presumably a positive state of affairs.
Both of Wollstonecraft's novels also critique the discourse
of sensibility, a moral philosophy and aesthetic that had become
popular at the end of the eighteenth century. Mary is itself a novel of
sensibility and Wollstonecraft attempts to use the tropes of that genre to
undermine sentimentalism itself, a philosophy she believed was damaging to
women because it encouraged them to rely overmuch on their emotions. In The
Wrongs of Woman the heroine's indulgence on romantic fantasies fostered by
novels themselves is depicted as particularly detrimental.
Female friendships are central to both of
Wollstonecraft's novels, but it is the friendship between Maria and Jemima, the
servant charged with watching over her in the insane asylum, that is the most
historically significant. This friendship, based on a sympathetic bond of
motherhood, between an upper-class woman and a lower-class woman is one of the
first moments in the history of feminist literature that hints at a cross-class
argument, that is, that women of different economic positions have the same
interests because they are women.
Letters
Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)
Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and
Denmark is a deeply personal travel narrative. The twenty-five letters cover a wide range
of topics, from sociological reflections on Scandinavia and its peoples to philosophical questions
regarding identity to musings on her relationship with Imlay (although he is not referred to by name in the text).
Using the rhetoric of the sublime, Wollstonecraft
explores the relationship between the self and society. Reflecting the strong
influence of Rousseau, Letters Written in Sweden shares similar
themes with Reveries of a Solitary Walker
(1782): "the search for the source of human happiness, the stoic rejection
of material goods, the ecstatic embrace of nature, and the essential role of
sentiment in understanding". While Rousseau ultimately rejects society,
however, Wollstonecraft celebrates domestic scenes and industrial progress in
her text.
Wollstonecraft promotes subjective experience,
particularly in relation to nature, exploring the connections between the
sublime and sensibility. Many of the letters describe
the breathtaking scenery of Scandinavia and Wollstonecraft's desire to create
an emotional connection to that natural world. In so doing, she gives greater
value to the imagination than she had in previous works. As in her previous
works, she champions the liberation and education of women. In a change from
her earlier works, however, she illustrates the detrimental effects of commerce
on society, contrasting the imaginative connection to the world with a commercial
and mercenary one, an attitude she associates with Imlay.
Letters Written in Sweden was Wollstonecraft's most popular book in the 1790s.
It sold well and was reviewed positively by most critics. Godwin wrote "if ever there was a book calculated to make
a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book." It
influenced Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
who drew on its themes and its aesthetic.
URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft#List_of_works
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft#Major_works