Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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Title page of the second, revised edition of Memoirs

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) is thebiography writtenby William Godwin about the life of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft , which ended with A vindication of the rights of woman (1792) had written the fundamental work of the women's movement.

William Godwin saw it as his duty, after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, to edit her unfinished writings and prepare them for publication. He started doing it a week after it was published and began writing a biography at the same time. After about four months, both were ready. According to literary scholar William St Clair, Mary Wollstonecraft and her basic script were so well known in England that William Godwin did not have to mention her name in the title of her biography.

The biography, published in January 1798, reflects William Godwin's grief over the death of his wife and is at the same time unusually open to his time. He wanted to portray her as a free, independent and unconventional person and frankly mentioned numerous details from the life of Mary Wollstonecraft in the book. It not only described her obsessive passion for the married painter Johann Heinrich Füssli , but also that Fanny Imlay was an illegitimate child, that Mary Wollstonecraft tried twice to commit suicide, that she was pregnant with Mary Godwin before she married William Godwin married and that she had refused any religious assistance while she was still on her death camp. According to the literary scholar, William Godwin celebrates his wife's repeated suicide attempts as a sign of her high sensitivity. In the foreword William Godwin writes:

“I cannot easily prevail on myself to doubt, that the more fully we are presented with the picture and story of such persons as the subject of the following narrative, the more generally shall we feel in ourselves an attachment to their fate and a sympathy in their excellencies. "

"I have no doubt that the more we know the details and particulars of a person's life, the more we feel indebted to their fate and grasp their unusualness."

- William Godwin : Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The publisher and friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, Joseph Johnson , advised William Godwin against detailing her life. However, William Godwin refused. The book caused a sensation when it was published and was so badly criticized that William Godwin was forced to revise the second edition, which was published in August of the year of publication.

The book damaged Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation for generations. The conservative British press named Mary Wollstonecraft, based on this book , a "concubine" and "endured lover" because of her relationship with Gilbert Imlay , from which the illegitimate daughter Fanny Imlay emerged . Parents have been warned not to raise their children on the principles advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft's sisters, who ran a small boarding school in Ireland, lost students to publication. Mary Shelley , the youngest daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, later referred to her mother's unconventional life when she entered into a liaison with Percy B. Shelley against her father's wishes.

literature

  • Analytical Review 27 (March 1798): 235-240.
  • Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 1 (July 1798): 94-102.
  • Lady's Monitor 1 (November 12-17 – December 12, 1801): 91-131.
  • Monthly Review 27 (November 1798): 321-324.
  • New Annual Register for 1798 (1799): 271.
  • Mary Favret : Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, ISBN 0-521-41096-7 , ( Cambridge studies in Romanticism ).
  • William Godwin : Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman . Eds. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker. Broadview Press, Peterborough Ont. 2001, ISBN 1-55111-259-0 , ( Broadview literary texts ).
  • Vivien Jones: The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft . In: British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 20, 1997, 2, ISSN  0141-867X , pp. 187-205.
  • Mitzi Myers: Godwin's "Memoirs" of Wollstonecraft. The Shaping of Self and Subject . In: Studies in Romanticism 20, 1981, ISSN  0039-3762 , pp. 299-316.
  • William St Clair: The Godwins and the Shelleys. The biography of a family . WW Norton and Co., New York NY 1991, ISBN 0-8018-4233-6 .
  • Janet M. Todd . Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Death . In: Gender, Art and Death . Polity Press, Cambridge 1993, ISBN 0-7456-1055-2 , pp. 102-119.
  • Claire Tomalin: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft . Rev. edition. Penguin, New York NY 1992, ISBN 0-14-016761-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ St Clair: Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. 1991, p. 180.
  2. ↑ St Clair: Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. 1991, p. 184.
  3. ↑ Priest, p. 31
  4. ↑ Melanie Phillips: The Ascent of Women. Little, Brown & Company, 2003, ISBN 0316725331 , p. 14
  5. ↑ Johnson, Claudia. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel . Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1988), 64.
  6. ^ Project Gutenberg: Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  7. ↑ St Clair: Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. 1991, p. 183.
  8. ↑ St Clair: Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. 1991, p. 185.
  9. ↑ St Clair: Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. 1991, p. 182, p. 184.
  10. ↑ St Clair: Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. 1991, pp. 179-188; Seymour, 31-34; Clemit, "Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft" (CC), 27-28.