 

Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception

Eileen Hunt Botting

It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century
after her death in  owing to the negative impact of her husband
William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman () on her posthumous reputation. Although the Memoirs and
post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove under-
ground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the
nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s reception in nineteenth-century con-
tinental 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.
The publication of the Rights of Woman in London, Paris, Lyon,
Boston, and Philadelphia in  made Wollstonecraft the most famous
women’s rights advocate of the European and North American Enlighten-
ment. A second London edition, authorized and revised by Wollstonecraft,
appeared in . The Rights of Woman was published in Dublin and
translated into German in . Matthew Carey printed it twice in
Philadelphia in , and Joseph Johnson printed the third edition, likely
unauthorized by Wollstonecraft, in London in . Substantial excerpts
of the Rights of Woman were published in Boston and Philadelphia
magazines and translated for a Spanish periodical in the s.
The Rights of Woman was reprinted, translated, and repackaged with
new introductory material many times in Britain, Europe, and the Amer-
icas in the long nineteenth century. Wollstonecraft’s fame on the issue of
women’s rights and the public cachet of her name meant that there were
even strategic misattributions of texts to her. M. César Gardeton professed
to produce a new “loose” French translation of the Rights of Woman in
Paris in . Comparison of a rare edition of his book at the Bibliothè-
que Nationale de France with Wollstonecraft’s and other Enlightenment
feminist works revealed that he actually reprinted a French translation of
Sophia’s Woman Not Inferior to Man () and misattributed it to


Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Notre Dame, on 16 Jan 2020 at 14:32:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108261067.006
 Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception 
“Mistriss Godwin.” His additional misrepresentation, in the subtitle, that
the book was in its eighth edition, suggests that he thought Wollstone-
craft’s (married) name would sell copies. Soon thereafter in Brazil, Nísia
Floresta translated Gardeton’s  book into Portuguese, complete with
the (now unwitting) misattribution of the author as “Mistriss Godwin.”
Given that Floresta’s book was printed three times in s Brazil, it seems
that Wollstonecraft’s married name indeed could sell books on the issue of
the inequality of the sexes. Floresta and her works stirred further public
reception of Wollstonecraft – as both a theorist and a symbol of women’s
rights – in Brazil over the remainder of the nineteenth century.
Beyond such intriguing literary fakes (intentional and unintentional),
the English text of the Rights of Woman was reprinted in London in ,
, three times from  to  for its centennial, and in . Its
popularity continued in the United States, where it was published in New
York in , , , plus two times from  to  for its
centennial. The second German translation was published in Dresden and
Leipzig in , and the first Czech translation was published in Prague in
. Although the bulk of its reprinting and retranslation took place in
the late nineteenth century, the thousands of copies printed in Europe and
America in the s would have continued to circulate in libraries for
decades, enabling the readership of the text well beyond its availability at
booksellers. In addition, the Rights of Woman was excerpted and printed in
books, newspapers, and magazines throughout the nineteenth century, in
Germany, Britain, and the United States.
Given the robust, early international reception of the Rights of Woman,
why have scholars often failed to acknowledge Wollstonecraft’s influential
status in nineteenth-century feminist political thought? There are three
main reasons. First, the rise of anti-Jacobin discourse meant that an
association with the cause of the French Revolution tainted Wollstonecraft
and her works. Anti-Jacobin discourse – or anti-revolutionary discourse in
the wake of the radical stage of the French Revolution – prevailed in
countries that were enemies with the French republic, especially Britain
and the United States. Wollstonecraft was a supporter of the ideals of the
French Revolution, and as such, she and her works became seen by the
general public as dangerous sources of political instability.
Second, William Godwin published his scandalous Memoirs of the
Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in January  – the year
that was, coincidentally, the apex of anti-Jacobin discourse in Britain and
the United States. Godwin composed the Memoirs as a tribute to his wife’s
memory and philosophical legacy, within two months of her untimely

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Notre Dame, on 16 Jan 2020 at 14:32:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108261067.006
    
death as a result of a childbirth infection in September . Unfortu-
nately, the Memoirs damaged Wollstonecraft’s posthumous reputation,
because it revealed many shocking details about her romantic life, includ-
ing her tumultuous affair and illegitimate child with Gilbert Imlay and her
pre-marital sexual relationship with Godwin. Intellectual historians have
argued that after the mixed but generally positive early reception of the
Rights of Woman in Britain, Europe, and the United States, the publication
of the shocking Memoirs plunged Wollstonecraft and her feminist philoso-
phy into disrepute.
Third, the Memoirs sparked public interest in her life story and autobio-
graphical writings, and, in turn, a shift in the general public’s attention
from her Rights of Woman to her biography. In the context of the reaction-
ary politics of the post-revolutionary era, the widespread reception of these
texts meant that Wollstonecraft’s life took on more – and typically nega-
tive – significance than her ideas, at least for the general reader. Certainly
the Rights of Woman had notoriety in the context of anti-Jacobin politics,
but the Memoirs instigated a biographical and politically reactionary turn
in the way people read and responded to the Rights of Woman.
Seeking to correct – too late – the damage done to his wife’s posthu-
mous reputation as a result of his transparent report of her life, Godwin
published a second, edited edition of the Memoirs in London in . As
Lyndall Gordon has argued, Godwin’s corrections to the text still did not
address the most problematic aspects of his treatment of his wife’s roman-
ces, and thus did not put an end to salacious and misguided public interest
in her love life in the years to follow. Moreover, the Memoirs continued in
broad public circulation. The book was printed in Dublin in , and
three times in Philadelphia between  and . German and French
translations appeared in  and  respectively. The Memoirs were
discussed extensively – and usually critically – in British and American
magazines between  and .
Wollstonecraft’s autobiographical Letters Written during a Short Resi-
dence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark – initially published in London,
Delaware, Hamburg, and Altona in  – had as its implicit subject her
tragic romance with Imlay. The Letters saw a surge of reprinting and
translations after the Memoirs, probably because of the rise of public
interest in Wollstonecraft’s unconventional life story. Swedish, Dutch,
and Portuguese translations of the Letters, a new German translation in
Leipzig, and another printing in London, were produced between
 and . In this same period, her incomplete novel The
Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria – initially published by Godwin in London

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Notre Dame, on 16 Jan 2020 at 14:32:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108261067.006
 Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception 
in  – was translated into French, Swedish, and German and published
again in English in Philadelphia. The novel was widely read as a semi-
autobiographical defense of women’s right to sexual freedom and
divorce. No new editions of Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman appeared
between  and ; yet Wollstonecraft remained well known among
literary elites in Britain, Europe, and the Americas through the reception
of the Memoirs, Letters, and Maria during this time. In fact, it was likely
the popularity of Godwin’s Memoirs and his edition of his wife’s posthu-
mous works that led Gardeton and Floresta – across continents – to
consider the name “Mistriss Godwin” sufficiently well known within their
literary publics to publish apparent translations of her work.
The public salience of her scandalous life story in the first decades after
her death shifted the wider public’s focus from her ideas on women’s rights
to her biography. Consequently, a commonly reiterated scholarly view has
been that Wollstonecraft failed to have an impact in nineteenth-century
political thought, and only began to enjoy a serious following once the
leading feminists of the early twentieth century (such as Emma Goldman
and Virginia Woolf ) revived her memory and celebrated her life and
works as part of their own philosophies. In fact, the post-revolutionary
reception of the Memoirs and Wollstonecraft’s autobiographical writings
complicated, but did not eliminate, interest in her life and work in
nineteenth-century Britain, continental Europe, Brazil, and the United
States. While the Memoirs certainly tarnished Wollstonecraft’s reputation
for a general audience during the nineteenth century, her philosophical
and iconic significance was far from lost in the century after her death.
Even as her persona persisted as a controversial cultural icon of both the
dangers and the promises of women’ rights, her philosophy navigated an
influential course through nineteenth-century literary and political
thought. Moreover, women’s rights advocates reclaimed her life story as
a symbol of their cause, recycling it for their own feminist purposes.
Previous studies have focused on post-revolutionary Britain and the
United States, mainly the s, showing Wollstonecraft was more wel-
come in the rights-based, democratizing culture of America than in her
anti-revolutionary, Francophobe homeland. Her longer-term influence
in early nineteenth-century Britain is mainly discussed in terms of her
impact on Romantic and early Victorian literature, especially women
writers and what has been called the “Godwin–Shelley” circle. This
long-standing scholarly emphasis on the latter group of Wollstonecraft’s
“disciples” has filtered Wollstonecraft’s legacies through the life and works
of her husband Godwin, their daughter Mary Shelley, and the other

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Notre Dame, on 16 Jan 2020 at 14:32:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108261067.006
    
British Romantics, such as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. A Victorian bias
developed against the Wollstonecraft–Godwin–Shelley circles, whose
transgressive choices in matters of sex and love made them public objects
of “obloquy and scorn” in British Victorian society. This Victorian-era
scorn filtered into twentieth-century literary criticism, feminist historiog-
raphy, and histories of political thought, generating the view of Wollstone-
craft as taboo, unknown, or unread for the bulk of the nineteenth century.
In a refreshing change of historiography, British historian Arianne Cher-
nock’s recent book shows how the male radicals in Joseph Johnson’s and
Godwin’s intellectual circles in s London rallied around Wollstonecraft
as a philosophical and symbolic inspiration for their own defenses of the
female sex against patriarchal oppression. Their early championing of Woll-
stonecraft set the stage for later British intellectuals, such as John Stuart Mill,
to freely engage the woman question as part of broader theories of repub-
lican government and economic justice in the nineteenth century.
Beyond mentioning Wollstonecraft’s impact in Britain on radicals,
socialists, and chartists such as William Thompson, Anna Wheeler, Fran-
ces Wright, and the Owens, most scholarship has leaped forward to the
late Victorian era to chart her reception among women writers such as
George Eliot and women’s suffragists such as Millicent Fawcett. Some
attention has been given to Wollstonecraft’s legacies for the mid-
nineteenth century Unitarians in Britain, especially in the private lives
and writings of those interested in women’s rights, such as Harriet Tay-
lor. Barbara Caine has influentially argued that Wollstonecraft was more
of a “ghost” than a tangible influence in s British feminism, not
referenced in public due to the scandal of the Memoirs and its dissonance
with staid Victorian conventions of feminine propriety and sexual moral-
ity. Avoiding the pitfall of generalizing from one case to another, this
essay shows that the trend abroad was different than in her homeland of
Britain. As in the nineteenth-century United States, where Wollstonecraft
enjoyed a steady and increasingly warm reception in both public and
private, continental Europeans and Brazilians were comparatively open
to receiving and debating Wollstonecraft, both as an icon and a philoso-
pher of women’s rights, as part of their responses to the woman question.

Notes
 Ulrich T. Hardt, “Textual Introduction,” in Hardt, ed., A Critical Edition of
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on
Moral and Political Subjects (New York: Whitston, ), –.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Notre Dame, on 16 Jan 2020 at 14:32:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108261067.006
 Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception 
 Hardt, “Textual Introduction,” –.
 Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in
Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
), ; Sally Ann Kitts, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman’: A Judicious Response from Eighteenth-Century Spain,”
Modern Language Review, : (), .
 Eileen Hunt Botting and Charlotte Hammond Matthews, “Overthrowing the
Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth for Latin American Feminism,” Gender and
History, : (), –.
 Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Rights
Movement, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; Eileen
Hunt Botting and Christine Carey, “Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact
on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,” American
Journal of Political Science, : (), ; Lyndall Gordon, Vindication:
A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: HarperCollins, ), .
 Karen M. Offen, European Feminisms, –: A Political History
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), –.
 Gordon, Vindication, .
 Regina M. Janes, “On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman,” Journal of the History of Ideas, : (), –;
Marcelle Thiébaux, “Mary Wollstonecraft in Federalist America, –,”
in D. H. Reiman, M. C. Jaye, and B. T. Bennett, eds., The Evidence of
Imagination: Studies of Interactions between Life and Art in English Romantic
Literature (New York: New York University Press ), –.
 Gordon, Vindication, .
 Gordon, Vindication, –, ; Thiébaux, “Mary Wollstonecraft,”
–.
 Roxanne Eberle, Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, –:
Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (New York: Palgrave, ), .
 Anderson, Joyous Greetings, , ; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of
Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, ), –; Barbara Caine, English Feminism,
– (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; Cora Kaplan, “Mary
Wollstonecraft’s Reception and Legacies,” in Claudia L. Johnson, ed., The
Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, ), ; Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism:
Women in Britain, France and the United States, – (New York:
Palgrave, ), ; Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The
Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
), –; Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagin-
ation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , .
 E.g., Janes, “On the Reception”; Kaplan, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reception”;
Thiébaux, “Mary Wollstonecraft.”
 E.g., Eberle, Chastity and Transgression, –; Susan Manly, “Mary
Wollstonecraft and Her Legacy,” in G. Plain and S. Sellers, eds., A History

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Notre Dame, on 16 Jan 2020 at 14:32:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108261067.006
    
of Feminist Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),
–; Anne K. Mellor, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman and the Women Writers of Her Day,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Mary Wollstonecraft, –; Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, –.
 E.g., Betty T. Bennett, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), , , ; Gordon, Vindi-
cation, –; William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of
a Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –.
 Charles Kegan Paul, “Prefatory Memoir,” in Wollstonecraft, Letters to Imlay
(London: Charles Kegan Paul, ), v.
 Arianne Chernock, Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), –, –.
 E.g., Barbara Caine, “Victorian Feminism and the Ghost of Mary Wollstone-
craft,” Women’s Writing, : (), , ; Adriana Craciun, ed.,
A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (London: Routledge, ), –; Barbara Taylor, Eve and
the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, ), –; Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, .
 Pamela Hirsch, “Mary Wollstonecraft: A Problematic Legacy,” in Clarissa
Campbell Orr, ed., Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and
France, – (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –.
 Caine, “Victorian Feminism,” , .
 Botting and Carey, “Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact,” –.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Notre Dame, on 16 Jan 2020 at 14:32:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108261067.006