“Genius will educate itself.”
The British Literary Context of
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman and Its Legacy for Women
NORMA CLARKE
In describing her fi rst novel, the semi-autobiographical Mary, a Fiction
(1788), which featured a heroine who differed from the general run of her-
oines in being a genius, Mary Wollstonecraft remarked that “genius will
educate itself” (Prefatory Note). Mary, a Fiction was designed to illustrate
this view. Considered as a generalization, such an opinion was and remains
uncontroversial: all original thinkers have to fi nd their own way. However,
eighteenth-century Britain was a society that declared that women were
subordinate to men. Good daughters were dutiful towards fathers, wives
promised to obey husbands, sisters expected to be governed by brothers.
In this vision, original thinking by women had no place. Moreover, ge-
nius was a category culturally defi ned as male (Battersby 1989). Yet by
the 1780s, even the most diehard reactionaries had to acknowledge that
clever, thought-provoking, witty, intellectual, and indeed original women
had made signifi cant and welcome contributions to the national culture of
Britain. It was a paradox, and notions of exceptionality reconciled it. Such
women were exceptions to the rule. They were regarded by others as, and
understood themselves to be, superior. The word “genius” might override
constructions of gender: genius, though rare, was a natural quality which
could strike women as well as men. When female genius educated itself,
however, and took stock of a social order premised on the subjection of
women (and, inevitably, on some repression of that genius) the paradox of-