But when the philandering father of her first daughter offered her financial support after deserting her for an actress, she refused it: “I want not such vulgar comfort, nor will accept it,” she told Gilbert Imlay. Schooled only in the rudiments of reading and writing, she eventually became proficient in four languages and conversant with all the major strands of Enlightenment thought.įrom the age of 19 she earned her own living, often finding herself in very straitened circumstances. She worked tirelessly to educate herself. Entering adulthood with minimal resources, she determined to live as freely as possible in England’s class-ridden patriarchal society. She would never marry, she told a childhood friend, preferring to “struggle with any obstacles rather than go into a state of dependence”. Her short life was marked by bold nonconformity. She was the daughter of a drunken wife-beater, and men’s “arbitrary”, “brutish” rule over women was the target of Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and the theme to which she returned repeatedly in subsequent writings until her death in childbirth, aged 38, in 1797. A harsh critic, especially of herself, with the outbreak of the French Revolution she turned her critical fire on political and cultural conservatives, beginning with a fierce rejoinder to Edmund Burke’s 1790 attack on the revolution and proceeding through swingeing attacks on “despotic” thinkers of every stripe, especially defenders of male privilege. An unhappy girl from a dysfunctional family, she grew into a woman full of grievance, emotional need and intellectual appetite. Wollstonecraft was a hardworking literary professional who in the late 1780s got caught up in the riptides of history and thereafter swam with them, earning her fame and notoriety.
Centuries after her death, Wollstonecraft still stirs controversy. In fact she rarely stood still, but the self-description seems particularly apt now, when a statue of a nude woman commemorating her, unveiled recently on Newington Green in north London, is getting lots of critical mud chucked at it. R eflecting on her career two years before her premature death, Mary Wollstonecraft described herself as one of those who serve as “sign-posts, which point out the road to others, while forced to stand still themselves amidst the mud and dust”.
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