“Genius will educate itself.” 257son 1975, 17). It appeared at the same time as the avowed story of her
life, Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”
(1798), written by her grieving husband William Godwin as an homage
to one whose genius he expected his memoir to perpetuate. Instead, these
books unleashed what Pam Hirsch describes as a “feeding frenzy” in the
anti-Jacobin press (Hirsch 1996, 51). Counter-revolutionary anxiety was
high in the troubled last years of the eighteenth century. It was an easy
slippage from the facts of Wollstonecraft’s life that Godwin truthfully re-
vealed —her love affair with Gilbert Imlay, the illegitimate child, the two
suicide attempts — to linking her political espousal of liberty with sexual
license and mental disturbance. There were cartoons and scurrilous poems.
A satire, The Unsex’d Females: A Poem (1798) by the Reverend Richard
Polwhele, attacked Wollstonecraft for having led other women intellectu-
als astray. In the index of the Anti-Jacobin Review there was an entry for
“prostitution” and under it a note: “see Mary Wollstonecraft.” A review in
The Monthly Visitor attacked her for intellectual arrogance, a sign that the
whole construct of exceptionality had broken down: “she was a woman of
high genius; and, as she felt the whole strength of her powers, she thought
herself lifted, in a degree, above the ordinary trammels of civil communi-
ties” (Hirsch 1996, 51).
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the “ordinary trammels”
were powerfully reasserted. In the literary context, radical feminist pro-
test of the sort that was seen in Wollstonecraft’s lifetime was more or less
silenced for two generations. Charlotte Smith acknowledged her debt to
Wollstonecraft in the preface to The Young Philosopher (1798), which ap-
peared in the summer of the year Wollstonecraft died. Wollstonecraft, she
wrote, was a writer “whose talents I greatly honoured, and whose untimely
death I greatly regret.” Both Mary Robinson and Mary Hays turned from
fi ction to polemic, after the fashion of the Rights of Woman, but in marked
contrast to Wollstonecraft less than a decade earlier, neither author chose
to put her name to her treatise. Mary Hays brought out Appeal to the Men
of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798) anonymously, and although the
appeal was a feminist appeal, Wollstonecraft’s name was not mentioned.
Men’s prejudices, Hays argued, kept women subjected and mentally sub-
ordinate; they needed education as the fi rst stage in the quest for a more
elevated status. Gina Luria sees Hays’s Appeal as a gentler “companion-
piece” to the Rights of Woman (Franklin, 227). Mary Robinson adopted a
pseudonym, Anne Frances Randall, for A Letter to the Women of En gland,
on the Injustice of Mental Insubordination (1799). Like the Rights of
Woman, her Letter focused on education, and like Mary Astell she wanted