258 Norma Clarke
to build a university for women. Robinson reminded women they were “not
the mere appendages of domestic life, but the partners, the equal associates
of man; and, where they excel in intellectual powers, they are no less capa-
ble of all that prejudice and custom have united in attributing, exclusively,
to the thinking powers of man.” Under the name Anne Frances Randall,
Robinson complimented Wollstonecraft on her fi rst page, but again without
actually naming her. She honored “an illustrious British female, whose
death has not been suffi ciently lamented, but to whose genius posterity will
render justice” (Randall 1799, 2).
Happily, Robinson’s confi dence that posterity would do justice to Woll-
stonecraft was later realized, but considerable damage was done in the im-
mediate period following her death, by other female writers as well as male
writers. Satirical portraits of radical female thinkers appeared in infl uen-
tial novels. Elizabeth Hamilton created Bridgetina Botherim in Memoirs
of Modern Philosophers (1800), a man-chasing character easily read as
a composite of Hays and Wollstonecraft; Maria Edgeworth curried favor
with conservative readers by creating a minor role in Belinda (1801) for the
mannish Harriet Freke, a caricature of independent-minded womanhood.
Common to these depictions was the attack on self-assertion and visibility.
The ideal of female dignity was to become synonymous with a kind of
invisibility. Even well-established writers like Anna Barbauld felt the lash,
especially because dissenters no longer dominated the literary realm.
Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman” was conceived in the dissenting tradition of celebrating exem-
plary fi gures. The literary precedent was the enormously popular Life of
Mrs. Rowe by Theophilus Rowe (1739). Though Godwin’s book was at-
tacked by many, it was also preserved in the libraries of dissenting acad-
emies and Unitarian chapels where young women in succeeding gener-
ations had access to it and thus to the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft. It
was the daughters and granddaughters of dissent —Barbara Leigh Smith,
Bessie Rayner Parkes, Octavia Hill, Clementia Taylor —who spearheaded
Victorian feminism, and they had inherited sympathetic accounts of Mary
Wollstonecraft (Hirsch 1996, 53). They would not have been surprised to
read William J. Fox in the Westminster Review in 1831 asking, “how long
will it be before we shall have read to better purpose the eloquent les-
sons and the yet more eloquent history, of that gifted and glorious being,
Mary Wollstonecraft?” (Fawcett 1890, 19). Wollstonecraft went on being
thought about and discussed: working-class Owenite radicals looked to her
as a symbol of feminism. As a literary woman rather than as a radical
political thinker, she was included in Mrs. Elwood’s 1843 Memoirs of the