Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics. By Wendy Gunther-Canada. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. 224p. $38.00

Extract

This is a brave, important book that identifies and responds to the black holes between scholarly discourses and across genres to explain why and how Mary Wollstonecraft's texts should be recognized as “interrupting the fraternal conversation of political thought” (p. 42) among the men she herself described as “canonized forefathers.” Reading carefully through selections from Wollstonecraft's writings—letters, educational treatises, novels, the Vindications—Wendy Gunther-Canada elucidates the continuum of Wollstonecraft's radical political theory about gender differences. Rebel Writer traces Wollstonecraft's transformation from “arguably the eighteenth century's most rebellious female reader [to] its most revolutionary feminist author,” as she contested the portrayal of women in Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke, Fordyce, and Gregory, struggling to devise a feminism characterized by “the powerful confrontations between woman and the word, between literature and philosophy” (p. 16).