Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: A Vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft
- Chapter 1 Scripturally Annotated: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- List of Contentmatter
- Dedication
- Advertisement
- Introduction
- Chapter I The Rights and Involved Duties of Mankind Considered
- Chapter II The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed
- Chapter III The Same Subject Continued
- Chapter IV Observations on the State of Degradation to Which Woman Is Reduced by Various Causes
- Chapter V Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt
- Chapter VI The Effect Which an Early Association of Ideas Has Upon the Character
- Chapter VII Modesty—Comprehensively Considered, and Not as a Sexual Virtue
- Chapter VIII Morality Undermined by Sexual Notions of the Importance of a Good Reputation
- Chapter IX Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society
- Chapter X Parental Affection
- Chapter XI Duty to Parents
- Chapter XII On National Education
- Chapter XIII Some Instances of the Folly Which the Ignorance of Women Generates; With Concluding Reflections on the Moral Improvement that a Revolution in Female Manners Might Naturally Be Expected to Produce
- Chapter 2 Ripe for Revolution and Revelation
- Chapter 3 A Biblical Accounting for the Equality of Women
- Chapter 4 Femme Godwin and Her Religion
- Chapter 5 The Crafters of Wollstonecraft’s Religion
- Chapter 6 Fellow Heirs, Travelers, and Sojourners
- Chapter 7 Postmortem Rendering of Wollstonecraft’s Beliefs
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - Femme Godwin and Her Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 March 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: A Vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft
- Chapter 1 Scripturally Annotated: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- List of Contentmatter
- Dedication
- Advertisement
- Introduction
- Chapter I The Rights and Involved Duties of Mankind Considered
- Chapter II The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed
- Chapter III The Same Subject Continued
- Chapter IV Observations on the State of Degradation to Which Woman Is Reduced by Various Causes
- Chapter V Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt
- Chapter VI The Effect Which an Early Association of Ideas Has Upon the Character
- Chapter VII Modesty—Comprehensively Considered, and Not as a Sexual Virtue
- Chapter VIII Morality Undermined by Sexual Notions of the Importance of a Good Reputation
- Chapter IX Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society
- Chapter X Parental Affection
- Chapter XI Duty to Parents
- Chapter XII On National Education
- Chapter XIII Some Instances of the Folly Which the Ignorance of Women Generates; With Concluding Reflections on the Moral Improvement that a Revolution in Female Manners Might Naturally Be Expected to Produce
- Chapter 2 Ripe for Revolution and Revelation
- Chapter 3 A Biblical Accounting for the Equality of Women
- Chapter 4 Femme Godwin and Her Religion
- Chapter 5 The Crafters of Wollstonecraft’s Religion
- Chapter 6 Fellow Heirs, Travelers, and Sojourners
- Chapter 7 Postmortem Rendering of Wollstonecraft’s Beliefs
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Since Joseph Johnson published Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in January 1798, just a few months after Wollstonecraft’s untimely demise, arguably she became one of the most controversial figures in all literary history. To many readers at the end of that century and decades that would follow, the Christian piety apparent in Rights of Woman was nullified by the revelation of her “non-Christian” lifestyle. “Reviewers and commentators were increasingly unable to separate the writer from her texts,” Harriet Jump noted (2003, 1:5). Wollstonecraft’s texts were reconsidered, deemed dangerous and capable of spreading moral contagion, and then buried for nearly 50 years (5). However, there have been those who questioned Godwin’s rendition of his wife. To Anna Seward, Romantic poet and author of Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (1804), Godwin’s Memoirs was a “needless display of his own infidelity.” Godwin’s writing implicated his wife in his own skepticism and offered no proof that Wollstonecraft gave up on religion. Indeed, Seward questioned Godwin’s motives for “expos[ing his wife] to the censure of irreligion from the mass of mankind” (1811, 5:74).
As I theorized in my Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft,
When biographers write about a person’s life, they prioritize what is important to themselves: what interests them, what resonates with them, what helps them, what teaches them, what makes sense to them, and most significantly, what advances their own political agenda whether it is conscious or not.
(2017, 1)Even though Godwin’s critics and most scholars have agreed that Memoirs is biased and unreliable, his “account” of Wollstonecraft’s religious beliefs has continued to be accepted as gospel truth and repeated by some of the very same scholars that have disparaged his reliability. In 1981 Mitzi Myers observed that despite the profusion of discredit imputed to Memoirs, even after two centuries his biography “remains the substratum on which even the newest live erects their varying portrayals” of Wollstonecraft (299). In Margaret Kirkham’s words,
with a genuine respect for truth, but a total lack of interest in how the truth would be received and what effects it would have, he disclosed full details of his wife’s relationship with Imlay, her suicide attempts, and her having conceived his child before marriage. He also praised, without full regard for the truth, her rejection of Christianity.
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- Wollstonecraft and Religion , pp. 251 - 278Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2024