ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft, like her admirer Coleridge, had a powerful integrating mind which strove constantly for unity in the moral world of man, and which constantly renewed its vision of that unity with new knowledge, new experience, and new imaginative insight. Too much attention to the life, which often degenerated into dramatic but repetitive obsessions, has distracted attention from the almost constant growth of her mind and imagination. The chief problem in editing Mary Wollstonecraft, as in studying her, is one of temperament, and tact. The quality and vigor of her imagination require a response in kind, if an editor is to be able to decide exactly what is relevant to proper understanding of her and her work. The development of Mary Wollstonecraft's thought can be measured by the evolution in her sources, her reading, her intellectual pursuits; and where these are visible in the texts, they should be noted.
