Her influence thus went beyond the substantial contribution to feminism with which she is mostly associated and extended to shaping the art of travel writing as a literary genre and, through her account of her journey through Scandinavia, she had an impact on the Romantic movement. Her first publication dealt with the education of daughters she went on to write about politics, history, and various aspects of philosophy in different genres that included critical reviews, translations, pamphlets, and fiction. One of the reasons for this enduring appeal is that her reflections on the status of the female sex were part of a comprehensive understanding of human relations within a civilization she perceived to be increasingly governed by acquisitiveness.

While she had a good number of detractors following her death, owing mostly to the publication of details about her private life by her husband, William Godwin (b. 1756–d. 1836), she continued to be and remains an engaging author for feminists and political theorists more generally. She is remembered today principally for her penetrating assessment of the condition of women, but she continues to elicit much interest for her contributions to philosophy, especially political philosophy, and literature, including travel literature. Walpole once called her ‘a hyena in petticoats’, but it is a tribute to her forceful insight that modern feminists are finally returning to the arguments so passionately expressed in this remarkable book.Best known for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft (b. 1759–d. 1797) was a literary and social critic as well as a moralist, novelist, and philosopher. For Mary Wollstonecraft all aspects of women’s existence were interrelated, and any effective reform depended on a redistribution of political and economic power. As Miriam Brody points out in her introduction, subsequent feminists tended to lose sight of her radical objectives. Her book is both a sustained argument for emancipation and an attack on a social and economic system. “In an age of ferment, following the American and French Revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft took prevailing egalitarian principles and dared to apply them to women. Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, minor rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, no inscriptions, age toned pages, (see photographs)

Mary wollstonecraft book