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Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein

Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - Walpole called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.

'If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.'

William Godwin, the author's future husband, was not alone in admiring Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft's most popular book during her lifetime. Not easy to categorize, it is both an arresting travel book and a moving exploration of her personal and political selves. Wollstonecraft set out for Scandinavia just two weeks after her first suicide attempt, on a mission from the lover whose affections she doubted, to recover his silver on a ship that had gone missing. With her baby daughter and a nursemaid, she travelled across the dramatic landscape and wrote sublime descriptions of the natural world, and the events and people she encountered. What emerges most vividly is Wollstonecraft's courage and ability to look beyond her own suffering to the turmoil around her in revolutionary Europe, and a better future.

This edition includes further material on the silver ship, Wollstonecraft's personal letters to Imlay during her trip, an extract from Godwin's memoir, and a selection of contemporary reviews.

'I have lately written...a tale, to illustrate an opinion of mine, that a genius will educate itself.'

Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for her pioneering views on the rights of women to share equal rights and opportunities with men. Expressed most forcefully in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her forthright opinions also inform her two innovative novels, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, a fictional sequel to the Vindication. In both novels the heroines have to rely on their own resources to establish their independence and intellectual development. Mary learns to take control of her destiny and become a social philanthropist, while Maria, in The Wrongs of Woman, fights imprisonment and a loveless marriage to claim her rights.

Strongly autobiographical, both novels powerfully complement Wollstonecraft's non-fictional writing, inspired by the French Revolution and the social upheavals that followed.

Written during a time of great political turmoil, social anxiety, and against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft's argument continues to challenge and inspire. This revised and expanded Third Edition is again based on the 1792 second-edition text and is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations. "Backgrounds and Contexts" is also significantly expanded and contains twenty-four works organized thematically into these groupings: "Legacies of English Radicalism," "Education," "Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary Moment," and "The Wollstonecraft Debate." Opinions on a variety of reforms that may be compared and contrasted with Wollstonecraft's include those by John Milton, John Locke, Mary Astell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hannah More, Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin, among others.

"Criticism" includes six seminal essays on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Elissa S. Guralnick, Mitzi Myers, Cora Kaplan, Mary Poovey, Claudia L. Johnson, and Barbara Taylor.

A Chronology of Wollstonecraft's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

This volume brings together extracts of the major political writings of Mary Wollstonecraft in the order in which they appeared in the revolutionary 1790s. It traces her passionate and indignant response to the excitement of the early days of the French Revolution and then her uneasiness at its later bloody phase. It reveals her developing understanding of women's involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of the relationship between politics and economics and between political institutions and the individual.

In personal terms, the works show her struggling with a belief in the perfectibility of human nature through rational education, a doctrine that became weaker under the onslaught of her own miserable experience and the revolutionary massacres.

Janet Todd's introduction illuminates the progress of Wollstonecraft's thought, showing that a reading of all three works allows her to emerge as a more substantial political writer than a study of The Rights of Woman alone can reveal.

"Travellers who require that every nation should resemble their native country, had better stay at home," Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her lover, Gilbert Imlay, in one of a series of letters addressed to him from her travels through Scandinavia in the summer of 1795. With a keen, withering eye, Wollstonecraft, one of the founding mothers of modern feminism, of course offers her insightful observations on the condition of womanhood in these northerly nations. But she also delights the reader with poetic portraits of the landscapes, observations on the rural and urban societies she encounters, and the particular difficulties encountered by a woman travelling alone, with only her infant daughter and a nursemaid for company... especially a woman who asks "men's questions" of those she meets along the way. First collected in book form in 1796, these letters display a strikingly modern attitude from a woman who was far ahead of her time.

British writer and educator MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759-1797), the mother of Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, espoused her then-radical feminist and liberal philosophies in such works as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and History and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution (1793).

These three works of fiction - two by Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and one by her daughter Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein - are powerfully emotive stories that combine passion with forceful feminist argument. In Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary, the heroine flees her young husband in order to nurse her dearest friend, Ann, and finds genuine love, while Maria tells of a desperate young woman who seeks consolation in the arms of another man after the loss of her child. And Mary Shelley's Matilda - suppressed for over a century - tells the story of a woman alienated from society by the incestuous passion of her father. Humane, compassionate and highly controversial, these stories demonstrate the strongly original genius of their authors.

First published in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was an instant success, turning its thirty-three-year-old author into a minor celebrity. A pioneering work of early feminism that extends to women the Enlightenment principle of “the rights of man,” its argument remains as relevant today as it was for Woll-stonecraft’s contemporaries. “Mary Wollstonecraft was not the first writer to call for women to receive a real, challenging education,” writes Katha Pollitt in the new Introduction. “But she was the first to connect the education of women to the transformation of women’s social position, of relations between the sexes, and even of society itself. She was the first to argue that women’s intellectual equality would and should have actual consequences. The winds of change sweep through her pages.”

This classic work of early feminism remains as relevant and passionate today as it was for Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries. This edition includes new explanatory notes.

The first great manifesto of women’s rights, published in 1792 and an immediate best seller, made its author the toast of radical circles and the target of reactionary ones.

Writing just after the French and American revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft firmly established the demand for women’s emancipation in the context of the ever-widening urge for human rights and individual freedom that surrounded those two great upheavals. She thereby opened the richest, most productive vein in feminist thought, and her success can be judged by the fact that her once radical polemic, through the efforts of the innumerable writers and activities she influenced, has become the accepted wisdom of the modern era. Challenging the prevailing culture that trained women to be nothing more than docile, decorative wives and mothers, Wollstonecraft was an ardent advocate of equal education and the full development of women’s rational capacities. Having supported herself independently as a governess and teacher before finding success as a writer, and having conducted unconventional relationships with men, Wollstonecraft faced severe criticism both for her life choices and for her ideas. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she dared to ask a question whose urgency is undiminished in our time: how can women be both female and free?

Mary: A Fiction is a novel by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a female's successive «romantic friendships» with a woman and a man. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that geniuses teach themselves, Wollstonecraft chose a rational, self-taught heroine, Mary, as the protagonist. Helping to redefine genius, a word which at the end of the 18th century was only beginning to take on its modern meaning of exceptional or brilliant, Wollstonecraft describes Mary as independent and capable of defining femininity and marriage for herself. According to Wollstonecraft, it is Mary's «strong, original opinions» and her resistance to «conventional wisdom» that mark her as a genius. Making her heroine a genius allowed Wollstonecraft to criticize marriage as well, as she felt geniuses were «enchained» rather than enriched by marriage. Through this heroine Wollstonecraft also critiques 18th-century sensibility and its effects on women. Mary rewrites the traditional romance plot through its reimagination of gender relations and female sexuality.