256 Norma Clarke
passion” and Martineau, a well-regarded intellectual after the model of the
bluestockings, wanted nothing to do with her (Eliot 1855; Martineau 1855,
1:400).
Mary Wollstonecraft’s early writings engaged with male thinkers — like
Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and James Fordyce and John
Gregory, whose instructions to young women in Sermons to Young Women
and A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters were so widely read — to argue
the case for better education for middle class women. Her Rights of Woman
traced the degradation of women to their lack of education. The vision of
womanhood it offered to the capable few was implicitly one of cerebral
freedom removed from bodily passion with its suggestion of emotional
dependence. The dignity of this bluestocking ideal was undermined by the
determination of writers like Charlotte Smith and Mary Hays to protest
against the sufferings of women — either at the hands of abusive husbands
or, in Memoirs of Emma Courtney, from the intensity of unrequited erotic
passion — and by Wollstonecraft’s decision in Maria to extend her analysis
to encompass all women, including those of the very lowest social class.
Sharing much of the vision of Smith and Hays, Wollstonecraft showed
through the character of Jemima that the denial of civil and political rights
subjugated women as a sex, and even the supposed exceptions like herself
and her fellow writers were thereby limited.
Victorian “prejudice” considered these developments ill judged. It
was to be some time before there was general recognition that the ques-
tions Wollstonecraft and her fellow writers addressed were central to late-
eighteenth-century thinking. Cora Kaplan sums it up: “the reactionaries
and rebels of the eighteenth-century world that Wollstonecraft inhabited
were engaged in lengthy, nuanced discussions about the character, causes,
and consequence of human affect” (Kaplan 2002, 218). They were asking
questions about society and sentiment, about self-love and sympathy for
others, about virtue, sensibility, sentimentality, fi ction, and fact. Above all,
they grappled with the nature of human emotion and whether feeling was
or was not gendered. The “passion” Harriet Martineau disavowed in her ob-
servation about Wollstonecraft was lived, experienced, and investigated by
writers of all shades of political opinion, and by men as well as women.
Wollstonecraft’s Legacy
Maria, an unfi nished manuscript published posthumously, refl ected in
its details “the complexities of Mary Wollstonecraft’s own life” (Fergu-