ABSTRACT

Becoming Wollstonecraft: The Interconnection of Her Life and Works draws from biography to explain her works, and it analyses the works to draw a biographical composite of Wollstonecraft. Becoming Wollstonecraft will be more fully developed than previous works, with added information that has not previously been associated with Wollstonecraft, such as the story of Reverend Mr. Joshua Waterhouse.

Although there are over fifty book-length biographies published on Wollstonecraft, very few agree on much about Wollstonecraft. She seems to have become an “everywoman,” or a figure unfixed in time and protean. Deemed the Mother of Feminism, like feminism itself, she is what people have wanted her to be and is by no means an immutable or universal personage.

A study of her life as evident by her works and vice versa, this monograph intends to refocus the image of Wollstonecraft for students and scholars, informed by biographical texts on Wollstonecraft and on those people in Wollstonecraft’s life and acquaintance, historical context, and exposition from her works.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

part I|91 pages

Becoming the Ephemeron

chapter 1|17 pages

The Oldest Wollstonecraft Daughter

Becoming a Feminist

chapter 2|20 pages

“Misery Haunts this House”

Rescuing Bess

chapter 3|16 pages

Wollstonecrafts' Melancholy and Madness

chapter 4|20 pages

Becoming the Educator

chapter 5|16 pages

A Mother of Much, Many, and More or Less

part II|93 pages

“She Believed, Loved and Lived”

chapter 7|22 pages

Melting In and Out of Love

chapter 8|14 pages

Around Johnson's Table

chapter 9|21 pages

Barrier Love and Gilbert Imlay

chapter 10|20 pages

Wollstonecraft and Lucretia

part III|111 pages

Begetting a Revolution and a Legacy

chapter 12|22 pages

Lone Traveler on the High Seas

“Lost in a Sea of Thoughts”

chapter 14|23 pages

“I am Buried Alive”

Wollstonecraft's Afterbirth of Rights of Woman in Britain

chapter 15|20 pages

“A Thing of Shreds and Patches”

Wollstonecraft's Postmortem