Bibliography

Todd, Janet M. Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1976, 100p.

Annotated bibliography of Wollstonecraft's works and of secondary materials.

Williams, Leigh, and Rosemarie Johnstone. "Updating Mary Wollstonecraft: A Bibliography of Criticism, 1976-1989." Bulletin of Bibliography 48, No. 2 (June 1991): 103-07.

List of secondary materials on Wollstonecraft publishedafter Janet M. Todd's Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography.

Biography

Linford, Madeline. Mary Wollstonecraft: 1759-1797. London: Leonard Parsons, 1924, 192p.

Sympathetic biographical study.

Nixon, Edna. Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Life and Times. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1971, 271 p.

Biography devoting separate chapters to Wollstonecraft's major works.

Pennell, Elizabeth Robins. Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884, 360p.

Biography in which Pennell has "endeavored to supplement the facts … by a careful analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft's writings and study of the period in which she lived."

Tomalin, Claire. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Penguin, 1992, 379p.

Biography of Wollstonecraft, including a short bibliography and a family tree of the Wollstonecrafts.

Wilson, Mona. "Mary Wollstonecraft." In From Anne to Victoria: Essays by Various Hands, edited by Bonamy Dobree, pp. 560-73. London: Cassell and Co., 1937.

Interweaves biographical data with critical explication.

Woodberry, George Edward. "Mary Wollstonecraft." In Studies of a Litterateur, pp. 67-82. 1921. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968.

Sympathetic biographical account and general assessment of Wollstonecraft's character and works.

Criticism

Blakemore, Steven. "Rebellious Reading: The Doubleness of Wollstonecraft's Subversion of Paradise Lost." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34, No. 4 (Winter 1992): 451-80.

Claims that Wollstonecraft subverts the ideology of Paradise Lost, creating a picture of Eve that both sustains and undermines Wollstonecraft's feminist myth.

Colum, Mary M. "Mary Wollstonecraft." The Nation CXXXVI, No. 3528 (15 February 1933): 183-85.

Assesses Wollstonecraft's personality and work, comparing her political beliefs and prose style to those of Edmund Burke.

Conger, Syndy McMillen. "The Sentimental Logic of Wollstonecraft's Prose." Prose Studies 10, No. 2 (September 1987): 143-58.

Contends that, within the context of the eighteenth-century, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women exemplifies a particular kind of logical structure, despite widespread claims of its irrationality.

Downs, Robert B. "First of a New Genus." In Books That Changed the World, 2d ed., pp. 202-05. Chicago: American Library Association, 1978.

Briefly outlines, in an essay originally published in 1961, the prevailing attitude toward women in the eighteenth century, and recapitulates the main arguments of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Falco, Maria J., ed. Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, 234p.

Collection of essays on Wollstonecraft's feminist philosophy, discussing such. themes as Wollstonecraft's relationship with Rousseau, her use of writing to encourage political and social reform, and her modern philosophical legacy. The essays by Wendy Gunther-Canada and Miriam Brody are included in the entry above.

Griffin, Cindy L. ."Rhetoricizing Alienation: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rhetorical Construction of Woman's Oppression." Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, No. 3 (August 1994): 293-312.

Claims that Wollstonecraft provides a non-Marxist critique of alienation that focuses on women's discursive interpellation as passive objects rather than active subjects.

Gubar, Susan. "Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of It Takes One to Know One'." Feminist Studies 20, No. 3 (Fall 1994): 453-73.

Contends that, while Wollstonecraft initiated a tradition of feminist expository prose, she also fostered what Gubar calls "feminist misogyny," which has been inherited by her feminist descendants.

Gunther-Canada, Wendy. "The Politics of Sense and Sensibility: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay Graham on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France." In Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by Hilda L. Smith, pp. 126-47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Uses the notions of "sense and sensibility" in order to understand how Wollstonecraft and Macaulay challenged the gender and class hierarchy of Burke's Reflections.

Guralnick, Elissa S. "Radical Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Studies in Burke & His Time 18, No. 3 (Autumn 1977): 155-66.

Argues that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman carries implications beyond feminism in that it is a "radical political tract" on the order of, though surpassing, A Vindication of the Rights of Men.

Homans, Margaret. "Feminist Fictions and Feminist Theories of Narrative." Narrative 2, No. I (January 1994): 3-16.

Compares the ways in which Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God comment on the narrative structures available to women.

Jones, Vivien. "Femininity, Nationalism, and Romanticism: The Politics of Gender in the Revolution Controversy." History of European Ideas 16, No. 1-3 (1993): 299-305.

Discusses the ways in which Helen Maria Williams's Letters from France and Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution "negotiate this fraught conjunction of national, sexual, and literary identities" through histories of the French Revolution.

Lawrence, Karen R. "Composing the Self in Letters: Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark." In Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition, pp. 74-102. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Explores the ways in which Wollstonecraft's letters challenge both male-dominated and feminist versions of travel-writing and epistolarity.

Myers, Mitzi. "Pedagogy as Self-Expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice." In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock, pp. 192-210. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Discerns the ways in which Wollstonecraft's writings comprise self-expressive exercises in autobiography, in opposition to male models.

O'Quinn, Daniel. "Trembling: Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and the Resistance to Literature." ELH 64, No. 3 (Fall 1997): 761-88.

Argues that Godwin's editorial revisions to the plot of Wollstonecraft's late novel "reorient Maria and effectively disable Wollstonecraft's performative critique of the ideology of sentimental fiction."

Parke, Catherine N. "What Kind of Heroine Is Mary Wollstonecraft?" In Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics: Essays in Honor of Jean H. Hagstrum, edited by Syndy McMillen Conger, pp. 103-19. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.

Attempts to portray Wollstonecraft as a revolutionary writer whose particular brand of "outlawry" provides challenges for her biographers.

Poovey, Mary. "Mary Wollstonecraft: The Gender of Genres in Late Eighteenth-Century England." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 15, No. 2 (Winter 1982): III-26.

Views Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman as a sentimental approach to the political insights of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

——. "Man's Discourse, Woman's Heart: Mary Wollstonecraft's Two Vindications." In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, pp. 48-81. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Examines the struggle between conflicting desires—to claim the emotional rewards afforded to woman and to assert her literary and philosophical independence—in Wollstonecraft's writings, concluding that "the price Wollstonecraft felt her new profession exacted was her female sexuality."

Robinson, Daniel. "Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Fiction." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9, No. 2 (January 1997): 183-202.

Contrasts the ways in which Wollstonecraft attempts to reconcile her feminism and her religious faith in Mary and The Wrongs of Woman.

Sapiro, Virginia. "Feminist Studies and the Discipline: A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft." University of Michigan Papers in Women's Studies 1, No. I (February 1974): 178-200.

Relates A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to the philosophical thought of Wollstonecraft's era.

Smith, Amy Elizabeth. "Roles for Readers in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 32, No. 3 (Summer 1992): 555-70.

Argues that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman anticipates both male and female readers, with rhetorical strategies that address both genders.

Stewart, Sally N. "Mary Wollstonecraft's Contributions to the Analytical Review." Essays in Literature XI, No. 2 (Fall 1984): 187-99.

Attempts to determine which writings Wollstonecraftcontributed to the Analytical Review.

Taylor, Anya. "Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, and the Rights of Women." In Coleridge's Visionary Languages: Essays in Honour of J. B. Beer, edited by Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley, pp. 83-98. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993.

Explores the influence of Wollstonecraft's writings on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's advocacy of women's rights.

Todd, Janet M. "Reason and Sensibility in Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman." Frontiers V, No. 3 (Fall 1980): 17-20.

Understands Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman to be a continuation and reinforcement of the anti-sentimentalism of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

——. "Political Friendship." In Women's Friendship in Literature, pp. 191-245. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

Interprets friendship motifs in Mary and The Wrongs of Woman.

Venturo, David F. "Concurring Opponents: Mary Wollstonecraft and Jonathan Swift on Women's Education and the Sexless Nature of Virtue." In Pope, Swift, and Women Writers, edited by Donald C. Mell, pp. 192-202. Cranbury, N. J.: Associated University Presses, 1996.

Argues—contrary to the common critical opinion that Wollstonecraft and Swift advance opposite views toward women's issues—that the two thinkers share many common attitudes concerning women's education and eighteenth-century standards of virtue.

Vlasopolos, Anca. "Mary Wollstonecraft's Mask of Reason in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Dalhousie Review 60, No. 3 (Autumn 1980): 462-71.

Explores the ways in which Wollstonecraft emphasizes reason (over sensibility) in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in an effort to gain credibility with her male audience.

Wardle, Ralph M. "Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer." PMLA LXII, No. 4 (December 1947): 1000-09.

Charts Wollstonecraft's "conversion from genteel liberalism to brash radicalism" by tracing the evolution of thought in some Analytical Review essays that Wardle believes are Wollstonecraft's work.

Additional coverage of Wollstonecraft's life and career is contained in the following source published by The Gale Group: Literature Criticism 1400-1800, Vol. 5, and Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 39, 104, and 158