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Brief Lives

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Sandrine Bergès considers the too short wanderings of a political philosopher.

Mary Wollstonecraft is more popular now than at possibly any other time after her death. A campaign has been waged to install a statue of her in Newington Green, London, where she lived and worked for some years; her portrait was even projected onto the British Houses of Parliament. Yet there is something a bit shallow and unsatisfying about how she is popularly being remembered: as the ‘mother of feminism’ – a title that gets bandied about whenever an early female author is rediscovered; as a scandalous single mother – the reason why readers avoided her books through the nineteenth century; or as the mother of the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. There’s a lot more to Mary Wollstonecraft than motherhood. Over the last ten years her work as a philosopher has come under increasing scrutiny, and as a result it is now valued, if not as it should be, at least in a way that promises it may become so.

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