MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: A NEW GENUS

the long version

"In this new biography, Lyndall Gordon proposes that at each stage of this extraordinary life - as teacher, writer, traveller - Mary Wollstonecraft was an original. She had advanced ideas on education and her attitudes to single motherhood, family responsibilities, working life, domestic affections, the importance of friendship and sexual relationships now look astonishingly modern. She tested the new ways man and woman might live together. 'Imagination must lead the senses, not the senses the imagination, ' she told her lover, Gilbert Imlay, and repeated to her husband, William Godwin." "And though she died young, her new genus lived on in the lives of her daughters and immediate heirs, Mary Shelley, Fanny Imlay, Claire Clairmont, Margaret Mount Cashell, and later again in women such as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf." "Yet, from the time of her death in 1797 until now, she has acquired a reputation of being unstable and loose, a wild woman doomed to extinction. Lyndall Gordon's biography, the first to enter into the full scope of her brave and exhilarating experiment, probes these myths and vindicates her life in accord with Wollstonecraft's own values." "This account covers her period as a governess to the aristocracy in Ireland; as self-supporting writer in London; as on-the-scene observer of the French Revolution; and as a daring traveller to Scandinavia on the trail of an unsolved crime: the disappearance of a cargo of Bourbon silver. Like a detective story, the biography follows a newly clarified trail leading from Norway to Hamburg, when Mary Wollstonecraft uncovered the mystery of missing treasure, the true nature of Gilbert Imlay and her own delight in travel."--BOOK JACKET.