Wollstonecraft emerges here as intellectually formidable, emotionally volatile, politically serious and frequently difficult: governess, teacher, translator, reviewer, revolutionary observer, lover, mother and eventually the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Tomalin is very attentive to the friction between Wollstonecraft’s abstract commitments to liberty and reason and the much messier demands of dependency, love, money, work and female respectability. Written in the 1970s, the biography belongs to an important period in Wollstonecraft’s modern recovery, when feminist scholarship was dismantling the long afterlife of William Godwin’s damagingly candid memoir of his wife.

Tomalin allows contradiction and temperament to remain visible. The result is much more interesting than sainthood. It also gives excellent social texture to eighteenth-century women’s work, radical publishing circles, revolutionary politics and the strange intellectual world around Godwin, Fuseli, Joseph Johnson and the early British feminist movement. Tomalin’s debut won the 1974 Whitbread First Book Award. 

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1974. First American edition, first printing, stated “First American edition” with full B C D E letter line — the first-printing convention used by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich during this period. Hardcover, 316pp, with original illustrated dust jacket. ISBN 0-15-151539-5. Jacket shows moderate age wear, rubbing and edge wear, with some surface marking/spotting visible to front panel; boards and text block appear sound, pages clean and gently aged.