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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Mary Wollstonecraft was not born a feminist. However much she may have chafed under the tyranny of men, she kept silence until she had served her apprenticeship as a writer. In 1786, while she was teaching school at Newington Green, she wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, a collection of innocuous platitudes which any maiden schoolmistress then might have approved; in 1787, while serving as governess in an Irish family, she wrote Mary, a semi-autobiographical novel of sensibility about a virtuous and long-suffering heroine.1 Then in 1790, at the age of 31, she emerged suddenly as a second Mrs. Macaulay, a female champion of human emancipation, when she published her Vindication of the Rights of Men in answer to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. And early in 1792 she eclipsed even Mrs. Macaulay by urging, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that her own sex be included in the general emancipation. She who had been an obscure schoolma'am dabbling in fiction became for many of her contemporaries the symbol of women's potentialities—and for others, a shameless vixen.
1 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters was published in 1787; Mary, in 1788.
2 William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. W. Clark Durant (London and New York, 1927), p. 45.
3 C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries (London, 1876), i, 193.
4 Elizabeth R. Pennell, Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Boston, 1884), p. 94.
5 See Notes and Queries, xiii, i., 12, and Memoirs, ed. Durant, pp. 174, 190. The second article was, he observes, “not signed, but (I feel sure) written by Mary.”
6 Memoirs, ed. Durant, p. 180. See also his statement in Notes and Queries, xiii, i, 12, that Mary's contributions “began with the first number, May, 1788, and continued to appear in. nearly every issue.”
7 Miss Camilla Jebb, probably working from the evidence contained in Mary's letter to Joseph Johnson, reprints a portion of this review in her Mary Wollstonecraft (London, n.d.), pp. 182-183.
8 See above, note 5. It is a fantastic notion; but Mary might conceivably have hesitated to use either of her own initials in reviewing the Necker, and have anticipated the difficulty by introducing the T-signature a month in advance.
9 See Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. William Godwin (London, 1798), IV, 118. Mary quotes (or rather, misquotes) Gray's lines and then denies their truth. No poet, she insists, remains “mute” and “inglorious”; rather, “those only grovel who have not power to fly.” (Note that “The Cave of Fancy,” though published only after Mary's death, was written in 1788.)
10 W. Clark Durant may have ear-marked as Mary's all the T-signed articles. At least Elbridge Colby, in his edition of Hazlitt's Life of Thomas Holcroft (London, 1925), i, xxvn, 282n, 293n and ii, 2, attributes to Mary four reviews of Holcroft's writings, two signed M and two, T. Colonel Colby writes me that he cannot now recall exactly where he found evidence to prove that Mary wrote the reviews, but that it “must have been based upon information given me by Mr. Durant,” who died several years ago.
11 Strictly speaking, many of these articles are unsigned but are followed by articles signed M, W, or T. When two or more consecutive reviews were by one author, the editors supplied the signature only after the last.
12 The bulk of Mary's work for the Analytical was done during the years 1789-1790 when she was writing nothing else but translations and children's books. In July-December, 1788, she contributed 19 articles; in 1789, 153; and in 1790, 99. Thereafter (in the years of her fame) her contributions fell off: in 1791 she contributed 72 articles; in 1792, 56; and in 1796-1797, after her return from the Continent, only 13.—In this note and hereafter in my article I have assumed what seems to me beyond doubt: that Mary wrote all the reviews signed with the initials M, W, or T.
13 Analytical Review, i (1788), 457.
14 Ibid.
16 Godwin (Memoirs, ed. Durant, p. 28) says that “as far down as the year 1787, she regularly attended public worship, for the most part according to the forms of the church of England.”
16 Analytical Review, II (1788), 431-432.
16a Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Eject it has Produced in Europe (London, 1794), i, 17.
17 Analytical Review, iv (1789), 406-407.
18 Eventually Johnson made Mary his editorial assistant. (See Letters to Imlay, ed. C. Kegan Paul, London, 1879, p. xxi.)
19 Analytical Review, v (1789), 218.
20 See Analytical Review, vi (1790), 327.
21 See Memoirs, ed. Durant, p. 52.
22 Mary's deepening of critical perception seems hardly to have affected her reviews of novels; in fact she wrote only two thorough-going reviews of novels (Charlotte Smith's Ethelinde [December, 1789] and Mrs. Bennet's Agnes de Courci [January, 1790]) before her departure for France in 1792. Otherwise she was content with common sense criticism, lamenting the possible effect of novels on young lady readers, apologizing for the monotony of her own reviews, and now and again commending a mediocre novel simply because it rose above the dismal average for its kind.
23 Memoirs, ed. Durant, pp. 50-51.