The Personal Is Political 275ate love” prior to falling in love with Gilbert Imlay at the age of thirty-two
(1891, xiv). She commented, “I think... she was doing what she thought
was right” in living with Imlay without a formal wedding ceremony (1891,
xv). Finally, Pennell confi ded, “I know of nothing so tragic in fi ction as her
second attempt” at suicide after Imlay’s abandonment of her for another
woman (1891, xvi). Pennell’s reading of the personal basis of the argu-
ments of the Rights of Woman became a model for modern scholarship on
Wollstonecraft, which has often taken the form of intellectual or contextual
biography (Todd 2000, Taylor 2003, Gordon 2005).
Millicent Fawcett’s 1890 centennial edition of the Rights of Woman
was indebted to Pennell’s 1884 biography of Wollstonecraft. She similarly
framed Wollstonecraft as a product of the Reformation and the rights-
based theories of the Enlightenment. Yet she strategically avoided the
Victorian controversies surrounding Wollstonecraft’s romantic choices by
referencing the authority of recent biographical studies: “the facts of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s life are now so well known through the biographies of
Mr. Kegan Paul and Mrs. Pennell, and her memory has been so thoroughly
vindicated from the contumely that was at one time heaped upon it, that I
do not propose to dwell upon her personal history” (1890, 29).
Instead, Fawcett analyzed the arguments of the Rights of Woman and
their infl uence on the women’s rights movement: “I have here endeavored
to consider the character of the initiative which she gave to the women’s
rights movement in England, and I fi nd that she stamped upon it from the
outset the word Duty, and has impressed it with a character that it has never
since lost” (1890, 29 –30). As the leader of the British women’s suffrage
cause, Fawcett symbolically identifi ed her work for the “movement” with
the ideas of the Rights of Woman. Moreover, she provided a reading of
the treatise that shrewdly emphasized Wollstonecraft’s pairing of “rights”
with “duties” in order to persuade the conservatives in her audience of the
moral imperative to support women’s rights including suffrage. She drew
a contrast between the depraved eighteenth-century culture, which Woll-
stonecraft abhorred, and the decency of “our time” (1890, 27). The Rights
of Woman should thus provide a “pleasing assurance” to modern readers of
their moral rectitude, she averred (1890, 27).
While Fawcett, like Pennell, infrequently spoke in the fi rst person in her
introduction, she quoted the Rights of Woman’s fi rst-person arguments sev-
eral times, even to the point of repetition: “I have already quoted her say-
ing, ‘I do not want women to have power over men, but over themselves’”
(1890, 29). With such concentric circles of fi rst-person argument, Fawcett