274 Eileen Hunt Botting
Elizabeth Robins Pennell had published an 1884 intellectual biogra-
phy that defended Wollstonecraft against the widespread Victorian British
view of her as a morally dissolute practitioner of free love. She stepped in
to pen the introduction for publisher Walter Scott’s 1891–1892 edition of
the Rights of Woman when Schreiner left hers incomplete. Pennell’s intro-
duction generally used fi rst-person narration to ground her authority in the
growing, yet male-dominated, scholarship on Wollstonecraft and the his-
tory of women’s rights (1891, xxii). She also used fi rst person to signal the
international character of the feminist movement, from Wollstonecraft’s
time to the present. Pennell cited the Hungarian women’s rights thinkers
that dated to the French Revolution, and signed the essay with her own
location: Budapest, 1891.
As in her biography, Pennell reframed Wollstonecraft as an Enlighten-
ment Protestant to make her views on women’s human rights less startling
to a conservative audience: “that woman, as a human being, has rights
was but the inevitable conclusion of the then new philosophical theory,
that ‘man is born free,’ which, as inevitably, had been developed from the
premises of the Reformation” (1891, viii). As a biographer, she also per-
ceived the value of reading the Rights of Woman as grounded on the author-
ity of Wollstonecraft’s personal experiences as a woman: “had she not seen
for herself the unspeakable misery caused by the intellectual and domestic
degradation of women, she would not have been so quick to discern the
fl aw in the reasoning of Rousseau and his French and English disciples.
Her book gains in force when it is realized how entirely her arguments
and doctrines are based on experience” (1891, viii). While she recognized
the Rights of Woman as the “text book of the new generation of believers
in women’s rights,” Pennell distanced Wollstonecraft from contemporary
feminist activists, whom she claimed “have failed to grasp the true meaning
of the ‘Vindication’” (1891, xxii). Implying that some feminists foolishly
wished to escape sexual difference or domestic roles altogether, Pennell’s
clever feminist rhetoric presented Wollstonecraft as giving women both a
broader and a more sensible choice: “to live her own life, to follow her own
profession, whether this was solely domestic or no” (1891, xxiii).
Pennell used her introduction to rehabilitate not only the arguments of
the Rights of Woman, but also Wollstonecraft’s biography, for Victorian
consumption. She sparingly used fi rst-person narration to highlight her in-
timate and authoritative understanding of the most controversial aspects of
Wollstonecraft’s biography. “As far as we can be certain,” she noted, Woll-
stonecraft’s adolescent friendship with Fanny Blood was her only “passion-