Book contents
- Mary Wollstonecraft in Context
- Mary Wollstonecraft in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface
- Frontispiece
- Chronology
- Part I Life and Works
- Part II Critical Fortunes
- Chapter 5 Early Critical Reception
- Chapter 6 Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception
- Chapter 7 1970s Critical Reception
- Chapter 8 Recent Critical Reception
- Part III Historical and Cultural Contexts
- Suggested Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 6 - Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception
from Part II - Critical Fortunes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2020
- Mary Wollstonecraft in Context
- Mary Wollstonecraft in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface
- Frontispiece
- Chronology
- Part I Life and Works
- Part II Critical Fortunes
- Chapter 5 Early Critical Reception
- Chapter 6 Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception
- Chapter 7 1970s Critical Reception
- Chapter 8 Recent Critical Reception
- Part III Historical and Cultural Contexts
- Suggested Further Reading
- Index
Summary
It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 owing to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. Although the Memoirs and post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove underground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe, as in the United States and Brazil, was more positive and sustained in comparison to the public backlash she faced as a “fallen woman” in her homeland of Britain through the bulk of the Victorian era.
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- Mary Wollstonecraft in Context , pp. 50 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020