ABSTRACT
The authorship spent of this lengthy defence of Mary Wollstonecraft has never been discovered. Although there is no external evidence to confirm it, one possible candidate is Archibald Hamilton Rowan. In exile from his native Ireland, he was separated for many years from his wife, with whom he had corresponded about Wollstonecraft in 1794 after he became friends with her in Paris. Meeting Wollstonecraft’s calumniators head on, the author of the Defence argues at length for ‘the purity of her intentions’, her ‘genuine benevolence…enlarged philanthropy…solicitude for the interests of her fellow creatures, and.deference to the dictates of duty’. The Wollstonecraft who emerges from these pages, despite her human failings, is an admirable being who is said to have surpassed the common run of humankind in ‘loftiness of spirit, decisiveness of character, clearness of intellect, purity of intention, and benevolence of heart’.
