Product Description

Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement; produced an illegitimate daughter; and married William Godwin before dying in childbed at the age of thirty-eight. Often embattled and bitterly disappointed, she never gave up her radical ideas or her belief that courage and honesty would triumph over convention. Winner of the Whitbread First Book Prize in 1974, this haunting biography achieved wide critical acclaim. Writing in the New Statesman, J H Plumb called it, ‘Wide, penetrating, sympathetic. There is no better book on Mary Wollstonecraft, nor is there likely to be’.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31246 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. She has worked in publishing and journalism all her life, becoming literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986. She is the author of, among other books: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; Shelley and His World Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life; The Invisible Woman and the extraordinarily successful biography of Samuel Pepys. Other books written for Penguin are: Jane Austen: A Life and a collection of memoirs entitled Several Strangers.

Customer Reviews

The birth of a movement?
Fascinating story of the life of a strong, complex and tragic figure. Intelligent and highly readable biography. Gives a well-balanced look into both the intellectual and personal life of a woman widely considered to be the first feminist. Inspirational and addictive reading. Highly recommended.

Outstanding biography of a fascinating figure
It's always exciting to open one of Claire Tomalin's books and this is just as good as her books on Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys. Mary's ferocious feminism was centuries before its time, and yet Tomalin shows how everything she said prefigured today's version. This is also a crucial book in the history of ideas. We learn how after Mary's efforts, feminist ideas almost vanished for a century, showing how entire societies can rumble along with literally nobody attempting to change the status quo. We also find that a society can gain important changes, such as the French divorce laws of the time, and then lose it.

Claire Tomalin's extraordinary skill lies in her ability to tell us the personal story of her subject and set it with great sensitivity among the lives of those around her, while capturing the era. Perhaps today Mary's psychological condition would have been medicalised but she was simply incensed that society was so totally arranged in favour of men! Her breathless book, Vindication of the Rights of Women, won her attention and acclaim, but she wanted more, so much more, and became suicidal in the face of constant disappointment. A tremendous sense of the loneliness of people who try to change things comes across in Tomalin's work and the sense of injustice and plain human meanness comes across so clearly.

Perhaps more than her other books, this one shows Claire Tomalin's ability to consider everything and draw conclusions that include the personal, the political, the cultural and even then to transcend those and find more to say about the mysterious way our species changes its ways.

excellent biography
I have literally just finished reading this book and feel compelled to write a relatively short review. I am left with a feeling of sorrow yet high admiration for Mary Wollstonecraft as a person, her indelible unconventionality, her (shamefully unknown) legacy and her dramatic and tragic life. I say 'shamefully unknown' because, unless one expresses interest in this particular area in history, not many people will know who she is/was.

I am tempted to read some of Tomalin's other books if this one is anything to go by. More than once I had tears in my eyes at the end, that is how much the author pulls you into Mary's life.

All in all, this is an excellent biography, and I'm sure you will agree with me if you read it.