Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft's writings follow an interestingly comparable trajectory. Mary, a Fiction and the nascent feminism of a text like Thoughts on the Education of Daughters were transformed by the Revolution into the powerful radicalism of the two Vindications, and followed in 1794 by historical narrative in the unfinished Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, and in 1796 by A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark , a text which defies any easy categorization by genre. As radical histories, by women, Williams's Letters from France and Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View manifest a double pressure: ideologies of femininity and writing intensify and complicate the general threat to Enlightenment progressivism posed by the Terror. Like the Historical and Moral View, Letters from France asserts not only a distinct class consciousness, but also a national identity. A constitutionally sound English middle class is in both texts the missing term which would save France from destruction.

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