The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

This book was advertised as being in good shape, and for an 'old' boo,k it is! It was delivered promptly and well packaged. Claire Tomalin's books are a joy to read. So well researched, so personable, and so delightful to read.

This is an excellent and moving account of a woman taking on the dominant, restricting forces in British society at the end of the 18th Century. Her political dissent is comprehensive, from party politics to the education of daughters. Wollstonecraft was both intellectually and emotionally driven, and this bio catches both the acuteness of her thinking and the irascibility of her temper. Parallels with the contemporary situation of women and the recurrent dismissal of feminist politics are unequivocally implied by this account of Wollstonecraft's personal and political struggles. Details of who was where in France at the time of the French Revolution were difficult for this reader to follow, but the later sections about Wollstonecraft's death and the subsequent betrayals of her ideas by friends and acquaintances is by turns moving and maddening.

Get the book, but not this edition, which is so shabby. You can't tell where some quotations begin and end, some are in French and some are not translated, it's difficult to access footnotes with my kindle, and the illustrations are dreary monochrome. There are the usual glitches in line spacing and oddly laid out words that I associate with Kindle versions. As a book it is tremendous; as a 'product' it's awful and off-putting.

Biographies are often one of the best ways to begin to truly understand different historical periods. This particular one tells us much about the late 18th century in both London and Paris. Obviously it centres upon the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, a life that has in it much to admire. Just what it is that causes some to actually stand out from the "crowd" and embody finer principles, to be ahead of their times, is a difficult question. I enjoyed the book.

One star deducted for the usual reasons of poor presentation on kindle. The cross referencing and footnotes work well but many quotes from letters are lost amid the general text leaving the reader to work out where they actually end. It seems that the quality we expect from printed books is just not applied in the ebook world.

Claire Tomalin is slowly becoming my favourite historical biographer. This book is very readable, creating a very human picture of Mary Wollstonecraft's life. I took this on my Summer holiday and read it in 5 days, picking it up every spare moment that I had. From a feminist persepctive I enjoyed viewing the 18th century through the eyes of a woman who lived through it. I would happily recommend this book.

Should have read this ages ago. Fascinating person and time to be alive.

Claire Tomalin is one of my heroes and this is another object lesson in how to write a biography. Maybe Wollstonecraft wasn't always the astute, clear-sighted mother of feminism that I imagined, but her life was very interesting. Like many C18th writers, much of her political writing reads like a passage from Naomi Klein.

I expected this book to be a lot better, but it flagged a lot in the middle.

Not knowing anything about Mary Wollstonecraft apart from the fact that her book ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ is considered an important early feminist work, I was keen to find out how she came to write it, her personal story and - as is usual on these occasions – fascinated and depressed in equal parts to read about how grim the lives of most women were in centuries gone by – in this case the late eighteenth century when Mary lived.

The first 29 years of Mary’s (albeit unmarried) life were fairly conventional, but after becoming friends with a group of Dissenters (who opposed state intervention in religious matters), she felt compelled to respond to the French diplomat Talleyrand’s report to the French National Assembly in 1792 which said that women should only receive a domestic education. Mary’s radical (for the time) response was to argue that instead of viewing women as attractive ornaments or property to be traded in marriage deals, they should be educated so as to make them useful to society and give them access to the same trades and professions as men. She dashed off her book in six weeks to respond to current events and was intending to follow up with a more thoughtful second volume but died at the age of 38 before completing it.

The last nine years of her life were far more tempestuous than the first 29. She moved to France during the Revolution, attempted suicide twice, had an illegitimate daughter and finally married journalist William Godwin before dying in childbirth with her second child at the age of thirty-eight. It was these last scandalous years that were the reason she was notorious up until the late twentieth century for her private life, far more so than for her writings.

Mary wasn’t of course a feminist in the modern sense of the word (the current meaning of ‘advocate of women’s rights’ didn’t come into use until around 1895) and her ambiguous statements around the equality of the sexes showed that she grappled with the complexities of women's role in society throughout her life.

For someone of an intellectual inclination and not instinctively drawn to the role of wife, as Mary was for most of her life, the question was always “What can I do with my life? How can I earn my life in a tolerable way? How can I be independent and respectable?”

For many educated and middle-class women at the time, the only options open to them apart from marriage were governess, paid companion or schoolteacher. At the heart of Wollstonecraft’s argument was the social and economic reasons that compelled most women to marry – “the only way women can rise in the world”. Ultimately, she concluded that marriage infantilised women and generally made them miserable.

This book doesn’t gloss over her flaws. Contradictory, sometimes naive and easily offended, frequently depressed, yet confident and outspoken, she didn’t see any contradiction between her interest in women's rights and her quest to find a fulfilling romantic relationship, which was always important to her. She resisted marriage several times, yet when she did fall in love, she found herself totally emotionally dependent on her lovers and a victim of the gender inequality she fought against.

I’m a huge fan of Claire Tomalin’s biographies and have read many of her other books and this one pretty much follows the same format with family trees, chronology, notes and bibliography hidden at the back to help make sense of the mass of detail. A fascinating read.

Cuando descubrí a Mary Wollstonecraft me llamó mucho la atención su obra y su vida. Por casualidad encontré esta biografía que, además de estar muy bien estructurada y escrita, me ha permitido conocer una época apasionante, en la que abundaban escritores y pensandores que tenían mucho que decir y que abrieron nuevos caminos. Claire Tomalin escribió más ensayos y biografías de diferentes escritores británicos del siglo XIX que, estoy segura, serán tan buenos libros como éste.

When you read biographies of people that you wish to understand better, you want an honest rendition of that person's life, personality and the times into which they were born and lived. My initial interest in Mary Wollstonecraft was her position on, and reactions to, the French Revolution. After completing your book I was satisfied with what I had learned and came away with a greater appreciation for Wollstonecraft. Thanks, Claire. I will be searching out more of your books.

Not in the same class as Tomalin's biographies of Dickens and his mistress, but it did give me a richer appreciation of the wider intellectual contexts in which she was operating. I had no idea shed experienced the French Revolution at close quarters, or how sadly tenuous her position as a mainly single woman was.

Sometimes a little too much detail, I didn't initially get a sense of how important Mary was in the scheme of things.

I love this book. It's so well researched and informative.