Editor’s Introduction 9plete education from grades one through fi ve (United Nations 2000; 198).
A dozen years since the adoption of these goals, the United Nations has
reported signifi cant progress in realizing gender equity in primary educa-
tion in developing countries, yet “ten million more girls than boys” remain
out of primary school and “nearly two-thirds of the world’s 780 million
people who cannot read are women” (UN Women 2012). As with Kant’s
imagination of an international league of republics akin to the modern-
day United Nations in his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” Wollstonecraft’s
1792 demand for a universal human right to primary education remains
farsighted in both theory and practice.
As her originality as a political theorist has been more broadly rec-
ognized, Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman and her earlier Rights of Men
have been categorized as revolutionary models of women’s political writ-
ing. As Wendy Gunther-Canada emphasized, these treatises were Woll-
stonecraft’s fi rst forays into the traditionally masculine genre of the po-
litical treatise (Gunther-Canada 2001). A resulting trend in contemporary
readings of Wollstonecraft has been to distinguish her political treatises,
and sometimes her philosophical history An Historical and Moral View of
the French Revolution (1794), from the remainder of her oeuvre, which is
seen as more autobiographical and literary. Wollstonecraft’s major autobio-
graphical and literary works are generally understood to be Mary, a Fiction
(1788), Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and Letters Written during
a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), as well as her
posthumously published Maria and Letters to Imlay (1798). The integra-
tion of the study of the latter texts alongside her more explicitly political
works is ongoing, and should yield further insights into her creativity as a
writer who moved, strategically and artistically, across many genres.
For novelists, literary scholars, and feminists, Wollstonecraft’s blend-
ing of autobiography with both fi ction and nonfi ction has been an inspi-
ration. Novels, plays, and poems based on her remarkable body of work
and dramatic life story have been crafted since the mid-1790s. One of the
earliest was John Colls’s 1795 “poetic epistle” in honor of her Rights of
Woman and French Revolution: “Thus Wollstonecraft, by fi ery genius led, /
Entwines the laurel round the female’s head; / Contends with man for equal
strength of mind, / And claims the rights estrang’d from womankind”
(Colls 1795, 19).
As Norma Clarke traces in her essay for this volume, Wollstonecraft’s
own literary works, especially Maria, infl uenced the political ideas of
many women’s novels at the turn of the nineteenth century. Most signifi -
cantly, her daughter Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) pays homage