260 Norma Clarke
some (those of the Martineau persuasion) this was cause for regret; for
others it exemplifi ed the popular slogan of the women’s movement, “the
personal is political,” which argued that political discourses ignoring spe-
cifi cally female concerns such as reproduction or violence against women
or the sexual division of labor were failing women. During the 1980s and
1990s, Wollstonecraft’s writings were studied more widely. The Norton An-
thology of English Literature included extracts from the Rights of Woman
alongside Price and Burke as part of the “Spirit of the Age,” thus ensuring a
very wide readership among university students of English literature. Mary
Poovey’s infl uential The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984) situ-
ated a discussion of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen —who when Poovey’s
book was published were the agreed canonical women authors of the early
nineteenth century — in a lengthy account of Wollstonecraft. Scholars dis-
agreed on her legacies and her signifi cance for modern feminism, but as
questions about gender and subjectivity and the place of women’s writing
in the canon established themselves as key questions in literary study, there
was little doubt that Wollstonecraft had a central role.