Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written in 1792 and is a book that should be essential reading for students of British literature for a number of reasons, including its historical value, its particular place in that history as a statement of the rights of women, and because of the place the book holds among social writings of the time. It is also an example of an early woman writer who challenges the established order and who uses literature as her means of speaking out to the world. At one time, Mary Wollstonecraft was as famous a writer as her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, would become, but today it is clear that the daughter is much the better known of the two largely because of her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley and because of her creation of the story embodied in her novel Frankenstein. Both mother and daughter were important proponents of the rights of women both in their writings and in the way they lived and served as role models for other women of their time. Much of their work as writers and political thinkers developed from and represented the spirit of the Romantic era in which they lived and helped shape the world in which we live today.
Mary Wollstonecraft's best-known work is her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a work in which she expounded in the ills facing women and on the need for justice for women. Her stand was considered radical, and as a result she had to portray her heroine in a special way:
The exaltation of feeling prized by Romantics posed severe problems for women. However liberating, female desire was singularly hard to express. women had to survive in a culture in which the search for personal fulfillment had no ready place. Small wonder then that Mary Wollstonecraft placed her heroine Maria in a prison for the insane, the better to cast into relief the terrible tension in a woman's mind resulting directly from her powerlessness (Alexander 10).
Alexander sees a...
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