The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

Claire Tomalin

Penguin Adult, 1992 - Biography & Autobiography - 379 pages

Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement; produced an illegitimate daughter; and married William Godwin before dying in childbed at the age of thirty-eight. Often embattled and bitterly disappointed, she never gave up her radical ideas or her belief that courage and honesty would triumph over convention.

Winner of the Whitbread First Book Prize in 1974, this haunting biography achieved wide critical acclaim. Writing in the New Statesman, J H Plumb called it, Wide, penetrating, sympathetic. There is no better book on Mary Wollstonecraft, nor is there likely to be .

What people are saying

Review: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

User Review  - Jed - Goodreads

I'm not the type to read a biography for the heck of it, but this was engaging and well written. Wollstonecraft emerges as a tragic figure, sometimes admirable and sometimes pitiable. This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in W. herself or feminism in general.

Contents

• List of Illustrations: 5
• Two Sorts of Education: 24
• Newington Green and the Dissenters: 44

About the author

Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. She has worked in publishing and journalism all her life, becoming literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986. She is the author of, among other books: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; Shelley and His World Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life; The Invisible Woman and the extraordinarily successful biography of Samuel Pepys. Other books written for Penguin are: Jane Austen: A Life and a collection of memoirs entitled Several Strangers.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; Penguin books
• Author: Claire Tomalin
• Edition: 20, illustrated, reprint, revised
• Publisher: Penguin Adult, 1992
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Aug 17, 2010
• ISBN: 0140167617, 9780140167610
• Length: 379 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / General; Literary Criticism / Renaissance; Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory