Mary Wollstonecraft in Context

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was one of the most influential and controversial women of her age. No writer, except perhaps her political foe, Edmund Burke, and her fellow reformer, Thomas Paine, inspired more intense reactions. In her brief literary career before her untimely death in 1797, Wollstonecraft achieved remarkable success in an unusually wide range of genres: from education tracts and political polemics, to novels and travel writing. Just as impressive as her expansive range was the profound evolution of her thinking in the decade when she flourished as an author. In this collection of essays, leading international scholars reveal the intricate biographical, critical, cultural, and historical context crucial for understanding Mary Wollstonecraft's oeuvre. Chapters on British radicalism and conservatism, French philosophes and English Dissenters, constitutional law and domestic law, sentimental literature, eighteenth-century periodicals and more elucidate Wollstonecraft's social and political thought, historical writings, moral tales for children, and novels.

Editors
Nancy E. Johnson, State University of New York, New Paltz
Nancy E. Johnson is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York, New Paltz. She is the author of The English Jacobin Novel on Rights Property and the Law (2004), editor of Impassioned Jurisprudence (2015), and scholarly editor of The Court Journals of Frances Burney, Volume VI: 1790–1 (2019). She has published widely on literature of the 1790s and the intersections of literature and legal thought in the eighteenth century.

Paul Keen, Carleton University, Ottawa
Paul Keen is Professor of English at Carleton University, Ottawa. He is the author and editor of several books including The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1999), Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, 2012), and The Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850 (forthcoming).

Contributors
Kate Chisholm, Andrew McInnes, Julie Carlson, David Fallon, Nancy E. Johnson, Eileen Hunt Botting, Julie Murray, Eliza O'Brien, Mary A. Favret, David O'Shaughnessy, Jon Mee, Paul Keen, Mary Fairclough, Michelle Levy, Claire Grogan, Sylvana Tomaselli, Andrew McKendry, Laura Kirkley, Frans de Bruyn, Pamela Clemit, Lena Halldenius, Jane Moore, Ian Ward, Catherine Packham, Rebecca Probert, Katie Donington, Betty Schellenberg, Vivien Jones, Frances Ferguson, Alex Wetmore, April London, Gary Kelly, Andrew O'Malley, Michael Gamer, Pamela Perkins, Jonathan Sachs, Jacqueline George, Alessa Johns