ABSTRACT
The renewed attack on Mary Wollstonecraft’s conduct and morals forms part of a longer article reviling the radical author, bookseller and publisher Richard Phillips. The article takes the form of a letter to the editor, and the identity of the writer is unknown, though he may indeed have been a correspondent rather than a regular journalist. The chief object of his attack is the Annual Necrology for 1797–8, which, perhaps rather ironically, carried an obituary of Burke in addition to that of Wollstonecraft. Having dealt summarily with the entry ‘which Mr P’s biographer is pleased to call the life of Mr Burke’, which the writer calls a ‘tissue of calumny’, he moves on to ‘the tainted name of Mary Wollstonecraft’. His whole review is conducted in a breathless tone of high moral indignation, and rehearses the by now commonplace terminology – ‘adulterous passion’, ‘prostitution’, ‘paramour’ – associated with conservative assessments of Wollstonecraft’s life.
