2 Editor’s Introduction
Since the publication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft has be-
come a major philosophical and personal icon of the cause of women’s
rights. In the mid- to late 1790s, however, two factors converged to inhibit
public support for Wollstonecraft and her Rights of Woman in both Britain
and America (Botting 2013b, 274). First, anti-Jacobin discourse — or anti-
revolutionary discourse after the radical stage of the French Revolution —
inundated countries that were enemies of the French republic, especially
Britain and the United States under President John Adams. Because Woll-
stonecraft was a follower of the ideals of the French Revolution, she and
her works were branded as Jacobin and portrayed to the general public as
dangerous sources of political instability.
Second, William Godwin published his scandalous Memoirs of the Au-
thor of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in London in 1798. Godwin
intended the Memoirs to be a tribute to his wife’s memory and philosophi-
cal legacy, capturing the whole of her complex life and work for posterity.
Still in deep mourning, he composed the book within two months of her
untimely death as a result of a childbirth infection in September 1797.
The biographical transparency of the Memoirs hurt Wollstonecraft’s post-
humous reputation, however, because of its revelation of her “republican”
(unoffi cial) marriage and illegitimate child with the American Gilbert Im-
lay during her residence in revolutionary France, and her premarital sexual
relationship with Godwin soon thereafter in London. Scholars have argued
that while the early reception of Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman in
Britain and the United States was mixed but mainly positive, the publica-
tion of the shocking Memoirs soon sent her and her philosophy of women’s
rights into disrepute (Janes 1978, Thiébaux 1979, Brown 1995).
Although the anti-Jacobins in Britain and America used her unusual
life and untimely death as a morality tale to illustrate the profl igate path
onto which equal rights would surely lead the sexes, Wollstonecraft con-
tinued to be read — often underground —by the leading progressive minds
of the early nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. In an 1843
letter to John Stuart Mill, the French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte
divulged how reading Wollstonecraft shaped his early thinking on the rela-
tionship between the sexes during the late 1790s: “All thinkers who seri-
ously like women as something more than pretty playthings have nowadays
passed through a similar phase, I believe. In my turn, I well recall the time
when the strange book of Miss Mary Wollstonecraft —written before she
married Godwin — infl uenced me strongly” (Mill and Comte 1995, 188).
Beyond such private browsing of her works, Wollstonecraft had a strong
presence in the public spheres of the United States and continental Europe