Abstract

In 2016, The New York Public Library (NYPL) acquired four manuscript pages of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that appeared to be in her hand. This article provides the first annotated transcription, comparative handwriting analysis, and historical contextualization to empirically demonstrate that these are in fact holograph manuscript pages, drafted by Wollstonecraft for the end of Section 3, the entirety of Section 4, and part of Section 5 of the concluding chapter (XIII) of the Rights of Woman. These are the only known extant manuscript pages of the Rights of Woman, her most influential work worldwide, or any of her published books. Beyond her manuscript letters held mainly at the Bodleian Library and NYPL, there are only two other known manuscripts of her shorter published essays, both held in NYPL’s Mary Wollstonecraft Manuscript Material. NYPL’s newly acquired manuscript pages provide insights into Wollstonecraft’s composition and editing process for the Rights of Woman, and more firmly situate the timing of her final edits to the first edition in late December 1791 to early January 1792.