The importance Wollstonecraft ascribes to philanthropy is embodied in her semi-autobiographical personae, who often delight in doing good for others beyond their immediate circle. Wollstonecraft uses recurring traits and narrative positions to delineate an identifiable, if protean, textual self, drawing on Rousseau to give her life experiences ideological value and to train her reader's gaze on the paradoxes of her texts. Her fascination with Rousseau is partially explained in a letter written to her sister, Everina, in March 1787: ‘I am now reading Rousseau's Emile’, she writes, ‘and love his paradoxes’. As Michèle Crogiez observes, paradox is useful to Rousseau because it can introduce ‘une apparente contradiction qui pousse l’auditeur à remettre en cause ses certitudes’ (an apparent contradiction that impels the listener to question their own certainties). In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft uses the term as a synonym for ‘nonsense’, condemning Rousseau for sacrificing ‘truth to a favourite paradox’ (V, 111), but elsewhere she derides the narrow-minded readers of his Confessions who ‘rudely laugh at inconsistencies as if they were absurdities’ (VII, 229). When she read Rousseau's works, she took pleasure in ‘concentering seeming contradictions’, and came to see paradox as the gateway to more nuanced understanding (229).

One of the defining paradoxes of Rousseau's oeuvre is that his political utopias depend on assimilating all human subjects to a single-minded collective, whereas his life writing reflects his commitment to living authentically in defiance of social convention. These apparent inconsistencies make his work fertile ground for Wollstonecraft to explore the challenges of her cosmopolitan ethic, including the need for critical dissent from national or cultural norms and values, and the difficulty of subordinating local and particular loyalties to the general good. This chapter focuses on Mrs Mason, the accomplished pedagogue of Wollstonecraft's Original Stories, and the eponymous heroine of her first novel, Mary, a Fiction. Wollstonecraft's approach to textual self-construction owes much to Rousseau, whose self-portraits are partial fictions through which he moulds the raw material of his life into ‘moral fables’ with universal significance. For this reason, his personae also incarnate the intertextual tensions set up in his oeuvre: Emile's Tutor is an authoritative pedagogue committed to an ideal, whereas the Solitary Walker is an acutely sensitive misanthrope resigned to disillusionment. At first glance, Wollstonecraft's personae likewise seem strangely dissimilar.