ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote – in addition to the novels and conduct books that were acceptable forms for women at the time – several political treatises and a history of the French revolution. Her explosive tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), challenges the circumscribed, education of women, and demands ‘the invigorating air of freedom’. This chapter uses creative, critical methods to explore Wollstonecraft’s material and spatial references, tracing a path from the explosive language she uses to describe the importance of the revolutions in France, through the beautiful meditations on the necessity of the open landscapes she began to associate own sanity with, to the silence of the domestic, confined space of her death. Usinga series of postcards written whilst walking through North London in search of the long-vanished Polygon, I enter a conversation with Wollstonecraft, building a feminist space between eighteenth-century mores and today.
