Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics

by Sylvana Tomaselli

In Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics, Cambridge intellectual historian Sylvana Tomaselli takes a holistic approach to the thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft, arguing that she should be remembered as much more than just the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft, though entirely self-educated, was a serious thinker. “Like many of her contemporaries, she sought to understand the circumstances that led to the stupendous events defining her time, but more than most she weighed the ethical choices they forged on those witnessing them,” Tomaselli writes.  Wollstonecraft was a prodigious writer, who earned her living by her pen, but died much too young, after giving birth to her second child (Mary, who would later write Frankenstein).