A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A key work of proto-feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft's readable and impassioned argument is as relevant today as it was 200 years ago.

Mary Wollstonecraft's words ring as true today - and are as little heeded by government - as when she wrote them, 200 years ago, in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The first pebble in the later avalanche of the women's rights movement

A book that was bold in its time and is now considered the notable forerunner of the women's movement

The first great piece of feminist writing

Changed the world for generations of women to come

A radical, rationalist and revolutionary, Wollstonecraft combined faith in both reason and emotion in her seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Her voice is as fresh and as urgent as ever

A classic of post-revolutionary thought, shaped by the Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication changed life for women the world over

You’ll still find, articulated in thrilling clarity, the essence of Wollstonecraft’s argument for the education of women, and for an increased female participation in everyday society… A classic of post-revolutionary thought, shaped by the Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication changed life for women the world over.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London. After an unsettled childhood, she opened a school following which her first work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, was published in 1787. After a stint as a governess in Ireland, she continued to write and published several other works including Mary (1788), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and her most famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). That year she travelled to Paris where she met Gilbert Imlay, by whom she had a daughter, Fanny. Her travels around Scandinavia with her baby daughter in 1795, inspired her travel book Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. On returning to London Imlay’s neglect drove her to two suicide attempts. In 1797 she married William Godwin, and had a daughter, the future Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia shortly after the birth.

A key work of proto-feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft's readable and impassioned argument is as relevant today as it was two hundred years ago. 
 
 Before the concept of equality between the sexes was even conceived, Wollstonecraft wrote this book, a treatise of proto-feminism that was as powerful and original then as it is now. In it she argues with clarity and originality for the rational education of women and for an increased female contribution to society. It was a cry for justice from a woman with no power other than her pen and it put in motion a drive towards greater equality between men and women, a movement which continues to this day. 
 
 ‘The first great piece of feminist writing’ Independent

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Vintage Feminism Short Edition)

Discover Wollstonecraft’s classic feminist text in an abridged, digestible form.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London. After an unsettled childhood, she opened a school following which, her first work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, was published in 1787. After a stint as governess in Ireland, she continued to write and published several other works including Mary (1788), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and her most famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). That year she travelled to Paris where she met Gilbert Imlay, by whom she had a daughter, Fanny. Her travels around Scandinavia with her baby daughter in 1795, inspired her travel book Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, but on returning to London Imlay’s neglect drove her to two suicide attempts. In 1797 she married William Godwin, and had a daughter, the future Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia shortly after the birth.

Discover Wollstonecraft’s classic feminist text in an abridged, digestible form. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZOE WILLIAMS 
 
The term feminism did not yet exist when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this book, but it was the first great piece of feminist writing. In these pages you will find the essence of her argument – for the education of women and for an increased female contribution to society. Her work made the first ripples of what would later become the tidal wave of the women’s rights movement. Rationalist but revolutionary, Wollstonecraft changed the world for women. 
 
Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short form

A Short Residence in Sweden & Memoirs of the Author of 'The Rights of Woman'

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) was a writer and founding feminist philosopher. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is her most famous work, but she also wrote novels, treatises and a history of the French Revolution, many of whose events she witnessed first-hand in Paris. She died eleven days after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley.

In these two closely linked works - a travel book and a biography of its author - we witness a moving encounter between two of the most daring and original minds of the late eighteenth century: A Short Residence in Sweden is the record of Wollstonecraft's last journey in search of happiness, into the remote and beautiful backwoods of Scandinavia. The quest for a lost treasure ship, the pain of a wrecked love affair, memories of the French Revolution, and the longing for some Golden Age, all shape this vivid narrative, which Richard Holmes argues is one of the neglected masterpieces of early English Romanticism. 
 
Memoirs is Godwin's own account of Wollstonecraft's life, written with passionate intensity a few weeks after her tragic death. Casting aside literary convention, Godwin creates an intimate portrait of his wife, startling in its candour and psychological truth. Received with outrage by friends and critics alike, and virtually suppressed for a century, it can now be recognized as one of the landmarks in the development of modern biography.

You've had The Big Read, now here comes The Big Think.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 97) was an educationalist and feminist writer. Part of the radical set that included Blake and Fuseli, her relationship with William Godwin and the birth of their child - Mary Shelley - outside of marraige caused great scandal after her death.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

Penguin Classics

Mary and Maria, Matilda

Three dark and passionate short stories from two powerful writers, who are also mother and daughter

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) was an educational, political and feminist writer who early in her life worked as a companion, teacher and governess. In 1788 she settled in London and began to work for the publisher Joseph Johnson, through whom she became part of the radical set that included Paine, Blake, Godwin and Fuseli. Her great work A Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792. She lived in Paris during the French Revolution and had child with Gilbert Imlay, who subsequently deserted her. Following her return to London and attempted suicide, she married Godwin in 1797 shortly before the birth of her daughter Mary Shelley. She died in child birth. 
 
Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was born in London. In 1814 she met and fell in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and in July they eloped to the continent. They married in 1816 after Shelley's first wife committed suicide. They had four children, but only Percy Florence survived. They returned to London from Italy upon Shelley's death by drowning in 1822. Her best known work is Frankenstein. 
 
 
Janet Todd is a Professor at Glasgow University. She has edited Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works and Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister for Penguin Classics.

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.

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

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 followed in the wake of these 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 activists she influenced, has become the accepted wisdom of the modern era. The present edition contains a substantial essay by a major scholar to celebrate the bicentenary of publication in 1792.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Miriam Brody

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 - one critic called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Books by Mary Wollstonecraft

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