Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (Oxford Portraits Series) - Tapa dura

Throughout this humane and absorbing biography, Todd usefully places the writings, like A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in their historical context, but in the end she finds Wollstonecraft's life and her letters more modern in their outspoken sensibility than her formal literary legacy. The New Yorker The only full-length scholarly biography to date, it is full of fascinating detail, absorbing, and often surprising. The New Republic The hard work and family values attributed to the middle class hardly obtained in the Wollstonecraft entourage, as Janet Todd makes clear in this thorough biography...Todd excels at depicting her subject's evolving personality and layered intellect. Washington Post Todd... draws heavily on Wollstonecraft's letters in this thoughtful biography... Wollstonecraft traveled uncharted waters: her voice, though egotistical, is unquestionably modern, a ' consciousness... sure of its significance, individuality and authenticity. Appropriate where biographies and women's studies are popular. Booklist Todd brings [Wollstonecraft] back to life in all her splendid contradictions, without condescension, idealization or, happily, without recourse to intrusive psychologizing. Publishers Weekly Todd tells the story of Mary Wollstonecraft's extraordinary life with calm judiciousness, an excellent sense of the social, intellectual, and economic spheres in which her subject lived and wrote, and a good eye for small but telling details. Times Literary Supplement Against the richly detailed tapestry of her times, Janet Todd has stitched the bright, vivid, restless, and agitated figure of one of the most fascinating and controversial thinkers of her time and proved -- through the sympathy, understanding, and intelligence with which she portrays her -- that she remains fascinating today. -- Anita Desai Todd reveals all in her top-notch and fascinating portrait, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. Library Journal A much longer revision of theories about nationalism and nations is now needed, to complement the brilliant destructive assaults in... After the Empire. London Review of Books Todd writes with verve, authority...and rhetorical grace. -- Anne K. Mellor Signs Winter 2005

With Mary Wollstonecraft and her "A Vindication of the Rights of Women", published in 1792, a modern female consciousness came clearly into being, one that tied the mind to the body. This beautifully written biography, the first new study of Mary Wollstonecraft in thirty years, argues that it is her life and letters that are her most lasting legacy. Her story reads like a novel - extraordinarily scandalous in conventional terms (a close involvement with a woman, two male lovers, an illegitimate child, and a habit of initiating amorous relationships), yet in her own terms always principled and highly moral. She strove to reconcile integrity and sexual desire, the duties and needs of a woman, motherhood and intellectual life, domesticity and fame.