ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century. Her works from her juvenile productions as a young girl in the Yorkshire town of Beverley to her final notes to her husband and future biographer William Godwin are instantly recognizable. Wollstonecraft's letters were self-aware certainly but they were also dashed off as the overflow sometimes of joy, more often of bitterness, ennui, and self pity. At different times the letters reveal her wanting to reconcile different irreconcilables – integrity and sexual longing, the needs and duties of a woman, motherhood and intellectual life, fame and domesticity, reason and passion – but all are marked by similar strenuousness, a wish to be true to the complexity she felt. Wollstonecraft's letters, often sent from the same fashionable locations, reveal mostly her thoughts, sensations and emotions. In many respects offending the canons of good letter writing, she was rarely concise, graphic, direct, realistically detailed, or detached.
