The collected letters of Mary Wollstonecraft

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the most distinctive letter writers of the 18th century. She talked and thought on paper and her letters were a large part of the drama of her life. In them she grows from an awkward child of 14 to the woman of 38 facing death in childbirth. At different times they reveal her very modern desire to reconcile the irreconcilable: integrity and sexual longing, the needs and duties of a woman, motherhood and intellectual life, fame and domesticity, reason and passion. Written on the hoof in cramped lodgings or swaying boats, in the wilds of Scandinavia or freezing Paris, they form a remarkable autobiographical document. With flashes of genius, these letters are compelling reading.

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