05 July 2004 at 7:40 PM, post #37

St. Clair, William. The Godwins and the Shelleys. New York: Norton & Company, 1989.

St. Clair’s text on the Godwins and the Shelleys is a more thorough examination of the life and works of William Godwin than it is a comprehensive look at all members of the families. The text still offers a wealth of information on the family tree and Godwin’s relationship with Wollstonecraft. In fact, the chapter devoted to Mary Wollstonecraft deals mostly with the circumstances of their meeting, their relationship and the birth of Mary Godwin (later Mary Godwin Shelley) which proved fatal for Wollstonecraft. In the preface, St. Clair writes, “this book is not therefore a biography of one man alone, but an account of two generations whose influence on each other was intense” (xi).

St. Clair devotes most of the text to biographical information but still addresses important works by all four of the authors and includes a bibliography of works by William Godwin. He acknowledges that Godwin left behind a wealth of papers for biographers to use, making the task a formidable one but still manages to add a few new pieces into the discussion. St. Clair fills the three appendices with extensive biographical information, the first appendix presenting “Godwin’s sexual relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft.”

The book offers a thorough index which helps readers wade through the information.

Feminist Interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Maria J. Falco. University Park, PN: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

This text consists of twelve essays on the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft, each written by a different feminist scholar. Maria Falco writes the introduction, attempting to unify the chapters of the book. Falco begins the introduction by discussing the negative reactions to Wollstonecraft’s work throughout history. Essentially, the text tries to dispel rumors and unfair criticism of the eighteenth-century philosopher and author. Chapters address Wollstonecraft’s literary relationship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, her involvement in the politics of the time, slavery, and feminism.

Both Penny Weiss and Virginia Sapiro discuss the debates between Wollstonecraft and Rousseau. Weiss’s chapter addresses “the gendered fate of political theorists” (page number). Later in the text, Weiss and Sapiro co-write a fictional debate between Wollstonecraft and Rousseau. In doing so, the authors hope it may be easier for readers to put the politics in context. The conversation is created from original quotations from the two thinkers and Weiss and Sapiro strive to choose passages in which the authors were directly responding to one another.

In addition to a works cited list, the text includes annotated bibliographies for Wollstonecraft’s works, biographies of Wollstonecraft and select secondary sources.

05 July 2004 at 4:12 PM, post #36

Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

This book contests critics such as J.M.S. Tompkins, Marilyn Butler, Gary Kelly, and Ian Watt who underestimate the literature of the 1790s. Johnson argues “that the fiction of the 1790s is a commanding, imaginative response to a world riven with crisis” (2). To support this assertion, Johnson connects feminist literary history to politics. The book addresses Edmund Burke’s writings including, Reflections on the Revolution in France and his contemporaries’ reactions to his work. Additionally, Johnson addresses Richard Polwhele’s late eighteenth-century work The Unsex’d Females which links a devious sexuality to heterodoxal women writers.

Johnson organizes her book into three parts addressing Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, and Frances Burney, respectively, with an afterword discussing Jane Austen’s work. Each chapter focuses on major works of these authors including, Wollstonecraft’s Vindications of the Rights of Woman, and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian, Burney’s Camilla, and The Wanderer, and Austen’s Emma. The chapters focus on these works but also address other, lesser known texts by these women as well as other works of the 1790s, including those by William Godwin and Matthew Gregory Lewis among others.

Johnson argues, “in maintaining that the welfare of the nation and the tearfulness of private citizens – actual as well as fictional – were understood in the 1790s to be urgently interconnected, my aim in the following pages is to open feminist literary history out to politics, rather than to advance a Foucauldian claim about the more covert dissemination of powers” (2).

Tompkins, J.M.S. The Popular Novel in England: 1770-1800. London: Methuen & Co, 1932.

This book attempts to answer the questions “what sort of novels were read between 1770 and 1800? What interests, tastes and principles do they reflect? What types do they exhibit?” (V). Tompkins, rather than addressing the literary merits of the period’s works, places the novels in their political, cultural, and historical contexts. In fact, she uses the preface to defend her book and writes, “for these are not good books, whose vitality springs from an inner source, but poor books, on which the colour of life was reflected from their readers, and must now be renewed by imaginative sympathy” (v-vi). Tompkins focuses her study on novelists whose popularity was undisputed at the end of the eighteenth-century and have since become increasingly obscure. Therefore, she spends little time on authors like Jane Austen and Fanny Burney but spends more time to authors like Samuel Jackson Pratt.

The book begins by discussing the historical context of the novel. The first chapter, “The Novel Market” – which again asserts novels of this period are meant as entertainment and not as art – and the second chapter, “Old Patterns in the Novel,” – which discusses the historical evolution of the popular novel of the time – gives readers background information about the historical context. Next, Tompkins’s chapter on female novelists examines the increase in the number of women writing for money and the cultural reactions to this new trend. Finally, the text covers specific forms of the novel including the Historical Novel and the Gothic Romance, explaining the evolution of these forms of the novel and their role in contemporary literature.

The text also includes appendices on “foreign novels in England,” “Courtney Melmoth’s Sensibility,” “Mrs. Radcliffe’s Sources” and “Specimens of the picturesque.”

02 July 2004 at 4:28 PM, post #34

1. Butler, Marilyn. “Editing Women.” Studies in the Novel. Vol. 27, Issue 3, Fall 1995.

Butler begins her article by discussing the role of female authors in college classroom settings before and after 1970. She addresses the role of publishing companies in producing inexpensive but quality copies of texts by authors like Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Felicia Hemans. In Butler’s opinion, female writers continued to be underpublished even in the 1970s when a large feminist movement pushed for the publication of certain texts. The publications distributed were rarely considered scholarly because they lacked the six requirements Butler sets up in the article (2). Butler asserts that only scholarly editions attempt “establish a text – not definitively, in the first instance, but sufficiently places and described to distinguish it from alternative version,” explain to readers what is “corrupt,” to put the text in the context of the author’s experience of life and reading, “to open up the text’s range of external reference, literary or historical,” to discuss the role of editors, collaborators and sources, and finally, to outline the reception and history post-publication (2).

Her argument moves on to discuss the historic and literary roles of William Godwin as well as Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. According to Butler, “since Godwin consistently and confessedly learnt from women (Ichbald, Wollstonecraft, Baillie, his daughter Mary) it radically alters the demonstrable role of women writers in that evolutionary history” (3).

This Butler article is an interesting discussion of the struggle to get women’s novels and other writings published. However, it may not prove useful if you would like a more in-depth study on a particular author of the period. She does discuss Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, her area of expertise, but the article is more a discussion of publication than actual literature.

2. Cole, Lucinda. “(Anti)Feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and more.” ELH, No. 1, (Spring, 1991). P. 107-140.

Lucinda Cole’s article addresses the role of sympathy in relationships, as seen in eighteenth-century literature, focusing specifically on Adam Smith, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft. Cole contrasts the use of sympathy in the works of male and female writers to illustrate how these three specific authors portray relationships between the sexes.

The first section, “Smith’s respectable attachments” sets the foundation for her comparison. Cole discusses The Theory of Moral Sentiments to point out Smith’s assertion that the most respectable relationships are those formed between two virtuous men in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith also discusses the relationship between sympathy and socio-economic ambition. His use of sympathy is based on the traditional model of the sympathetic male, prevalent in eighteenth-century literature.

The second section draws from Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, addressed to “Women of Rank and Fortune.” More uses Christianity to show that men and women are different but because of these differences the two sexes can be equal as well. Therefore, More cannot “admit the possibility of mutual sympathy between men and women” because, according to Cole, “[More’s] carefully constructed argument for the superiority of women, which requires the notion of difference, would tremble along with it” (125).

Cole ends with Mary Wollstonecraft’s theory of feminist sympathy. Wollstonecraft, Cole argues, expounds on More’s ideas by claiming that members of different classes, in addition to members of different sexes, are unable to form relationships of sympathy. Cole touches upon Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman but focuses more on her novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Wollstonecraft thus, continues to use More’s model but blurs the lines of class and gender to “erect an alternate vision of community complete with a competing ideology of women’s moral worth” (131).

Cole concludes with the assertion that “the discourse of sympathy is historically a legacy of middle-class programs for moral reform that, even in their more progressive versions, serve in one way or another to preserve the status quo” (133).

3. Kelly, Gary. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

This book address Mary Wollstonecraft’s political ideology and career in relation to the cultural revolution in the late eighteenth century. Kelly begins his book by placing Wollstonecraft in the appropriate political and historical context, discussing the roles of gender and class in the cultural revolution. He explains the effects of “the French Revolution and the cultural revolution that founded the modern state in Britain” (1). Wollstonecraft was able to take part in both of these debates because writing was a major force in both, especially the cultural revolution.

Kelly’s text focuses mainly on Wollstonecraft’s work, making it less biography and more literary and cultural analysis than some other books devoted solely to the eighteenth-century writer and philosopher. Kelly makes an effort to discuss Wollstonecraft’s more minor works, such as her lessons for children which, he says, “show Wollstonecraft’s idea of how the self and social relations are constructed in and through the structure of language” (202). He does, however, include background on Wollstonecraft’s childhood and poor relationship with her father.

Kelly’s text focuses on Wollstonecraft’s role in the two concurrent revolutions and their even greater impact on her work and life. He examines her debates with Edmund Burke over his Reflections on the Revolution in France and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, and Emile as well as some of his other texts. Additionally, he touches upon the role of Joseph Johnson’s revolutionary circle. Primarily, he focuses on Wollstonecraft’s role as the mother of revolutionary feminism in relation to the revolutions which shaped her life and writing.

4. Ferguson, Moira and Janet Todd. Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd create a balance of biographical information, political context and literary analysis. The first several chapters cover Wollstonecraft’s childhood, education, and her early fiction. The book then discusses A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and The French Revolution.

These later chapters, divided into sub-categories, address not only the named text, but also the circumstances under which it was written, the political context and contemporary reception. For instance, chapter eight, which analyzes Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, provides an historical and literary background, discussion of the organization, style and ideas, addresses Maria as Independent Hero, examines the role of Jemima, and presents autobiographical elements and political features. The chapter discusses Wollstonecraft’s use of the novel as a tool for implementing her political “theories into a practical context” (115). The thorough examinations of the text work to illuminate the political context of the time. They discuss how the French Revolution, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry and Reflections on the Revolution in France, influenced Wollstonecraft’s writing and life.

Additionally, Ferguson and Todd include a time line of Wollstonecraft’s life as well as biographical facts throughout the text.

22 June 2004 at 6:43 PM, post #23

Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Throughout her book, Johnson contests critics such as J.M.S. Tompkins, Marilyn Butler, Gary Kelly, and Ian Watts who underestimate the literature of the 1790s. Instead, she aruges “that the fiction of the 1790s is a commanding, imaginative respose to a world riven with crisis” (2). To do this, Johnson connects feminist literary history to politics. The book addresses Edmund Burke’s writings especially, Reflections on the Revolution in France and his contemporaries’ reactions to his writings. Additionally, she addresses Richard Polwhele’s late eighteenth-century work The Unsex’d Females which links a devious sexuality to heterodoxal women writers.

Johnson organizes her work into three parts addressing Mary Wollstonecrafy, Anne Radcliffe, and Frances Burney respectively with an afterword discussing the work of Jane Austen. Each chapter within the text focuses on a major work of these authors including, Vindicaitons of the Rights of Woman, Maria, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, Camilla, The Wanderer, and Emma. The chapters focus on these works but also address other texts by these women as well as other works of the 1790s, touching on William Godwin and Matthew Gregory Lewis among others.

This perspective on sentimental and gothic literature deals with feminist theory, sexuality, gender, chivalry and how the politics of the period shaped the literature of the decade.

Updated 22 June 2004, 6:43 PM

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