The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
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Product Description
Product Description
Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement; produced an illegitimate daughter; and married William Godwin before dying in childbed at the age of thirty-eight. Often embattled and bitterly disappointed, she never gave up her radical ideas or her belief that courage and honesty would triumph over convention.
Winner of the Whitbread First Book Prize in 1974, this haunting biography achieved wide critical acclaim. Writing in the New Statesman, J H Plumb called it, ‘Wide, penetrating, sympathetic. There is no better book on Mary Wollstonecraft, nor is there likely to be’.
About the Author
Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. She has worked in publishing and journalism all her life, becoming literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986. She is the author of, among other books: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; Shelley and His World Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life; The Invisible Woman and the extraordinarily successful biography of Samuel Pepys. Other books written for Penguin are: Jane Austen: A Life and a collection of memoirs entitled Several Strangers.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
It's always exciting to open one of Claire Tomalin's books and this is just as good as her books on Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys. Mary's ferocious feminism was centuries before its time, and yet Tomalin shows how everything she said prefigured today's version. This is also a crucial book in the history of ideas. We learn how after Mary's efforts, feminist ideas almost vanished for a century, showing how entire societies can rumble along with literally nobody attempting to change the status quo. We also find that a society can gain important changes, such as the French divorce laws of the time, and then lose it.
Claire Tomalin's extraordinary skill lies in her ability to tell us the personal story of her subject and set it with great sensitivity among the lives of those around her, while capturing the era. Perhaps today Mary's psychological condition would have been medicalised but she was simply incensed that society was so totally arranged in favour of men! Her breathless book, Vindication of the Rights of Women, won her attention and acclaim, but she wanted more, so much more, and became suicidal in the face of constant disappointment. A tremendous sense of the loneliness of people who try to change things comes across in Tomalin's work and the sense of injustice and plain human meanness comes across so clearly.
Perhaps more than her other books, this one shows Claire Tomalin's ability to consider everything and draw conclusions that include the personal, the political, the cultural and even then to transcend those and find more to say about the mysterious way our species changes its ways.
Claire Tomalin's extraordinary skill lies in her ability to tell us the personal story of her subject and set it with great sensitivity among the lives of those around her, while capturing the era. Perhaps today Mary's psychological condition would have been medicalised but she was simply incensed that society was so totally arranged in favour of men! Her breathless book, Vindication of the Rights of Women, won her attention and acclaim, but she wanted more, so much more, and became suicidal in the face of constant disappointment. A tremendous sense of the loneliness of people who try to change things comes across in Tomalin's work and the sense of injustice and plain human meanness comes across so clearly.
Perhaps more than her other books, this one shows Claire Tomalin's ability to consider everything and draw conclusions that include the personal, the political, the cultural and even then to transcend those and find more to say about the mysterious way our species changes its ways.
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Fascinating story of the life of a strong, complex and tragic figure. Intelligent and highly readable biography. Gives a well-balanced look into both the intellectual and personal life of a woman widely considered to be the first feminist. Inspirational and addictive reading. Highly recommended.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Anyone who loves history will love this book. Claire Tomalin has a beautiful talent for taking the reader back to a time and place. She has done it with Samuel Pepys and Jane Austen and here she takes a less stereotyped figure and shows us feminism in an embryonic form.
The heartache of a real life lived is combined here with Tomalin's sympathetic attempt to understand what Mary Wollestonecraft was really about. Mary seemed to fully understand how sick her society was when it came to evaluating and treating women, and she reacted to it so strongly it wrecked her life. Even the men who truly loved her couldn't handle her well enough to calm her down, and she persisted to her death with extreme reactions and angry responses. Tomalin carefully explores the question of whether Mary was mentally ill, combining it with a profound respect for her work ethic, strong-minded rejection of patriarchy and contempt for patronising atttitudes. As with her work on Pepys and Austen, Tomalin sustains a lovely neutrality with her subjects, giving them the benefit of the doubt and setting them in the context of their own time and place. Here, with Mary Wollestonecraft, she goes on to explain the poverty of female response for an entire century (1800-1900) following Mary's pioneering efforts to get women recognised as worth educating and employing. The crushing realisation that for so long most women were content to be shallow and decorative is the book's most astonishing finding. In spite of the author's magnificent control, you can tell from this book that she was as amazed by what she uncovered through her research as we are to read about it. How could it really have taken so long for women to campaign for a vote, when the English, French and American Revolutions had taken place? When Enlightenment thinking had gripped Europe and reduced the church dogma to a lifestyle choice? What was wrong with women during this century?
There has always been something other-worldly about Claire Tomalin and she is a giant in the world of biography. I love her 'thanks to' page and I love her asides but most of all I love the quiet but godlike intelligence that informs every one of her books. In one of her books she thanks her partner 'for his patience as I disappeared each day into the 17th century'. I am so glad she did.
You haven't learned a thing about the history of western civilisation until you have read Claire Tomalin - start here, with a less than famous figure, and you will fall in love with everything she has written.
The heartache of a real life lived is combined here with Tomalin's sympathetic attempt to understand what Mary Wollestonecraft was really about. Mary seemed to fully understand how sick her society was when it came to evaluating and treating women, and she reacted to it so strongly it wrecked her life. Even the men who truly loved her couldn't handle her well enough to calm her down, and she persisted to her death with extreme reactions and angry responses. Tomalin carefully explores the question of whether Mary was mentally ill, combining it with a profound respect for her work ethic, strong-minded rejection of patriarchy and contempt for patronising atttitudes. As with her work on Pepys and Austen, Tomalin sustains a lovely neutrality with her subjects, giving them the benefit of the doubt and setting them in the context of their own time and place. Here, with Mary Wollestonecraft, she goes on to explain the poverty of female response for an entire century (1800-1900) following Mary's pioneering efforts to get women recognised as worth educating and employing. The crushing realisation that for so long most women were content to be shallow and decorative is the book's most astonishing finding. In spite of the author's magnificent control, you can tell from this book that she was as amazed by what she uncovered through her research as we are to read about it. How could it really have taken so long for women to campaign for a vote, when the English, French and American Revolutions had taken place? When Enlightenment thinking had gripped Europe and reduced the church dogma to a lifestyle choice? What was wrong with women during this century?
There has always been something other-worldly about Claire Tomalin and she is a giant in the world of biography. I love her 'thanks to' page and I love her asides but most of all I love the quiet but godlike intelligence that informs every one of her books. In one of her books she thanks her partner 'for his patience as I disappeared each day into the 17th century'. I am so glad she did.
You haven't learned a thing about the history of western civilisation until you have read Claire Tomalin - start here, with a less than famous figure, and you will fall in love with everything she has written.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft
Another good biography by Claire Tomalin. This time the subject is sadly not as widely known as she deserves to be, but as a pioneering author on the subject of not just the rights... Read more
Published 2 months ago by KAW
Two sides to the coin
Claire Tomalin's enthralling and very detailed (occasionally slightly too detailed) biography of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft is a masterly piece of research and reveals a... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Mrs. A. Bradney-smith
The Life and Death of Mary wollstoncraft
I have long been interested in the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft. Claire Tomalin's book is just what I needed to help me further understand how M.W. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Skidmore
excellent biography
I have literally just finished reading this book and feel compelled to write a relatively short review. Read more
Published on 8 Sep 2009 by MG
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