Becoming Wollstonecraft

Dr Brenda Ayres has been teaching British literature for forty years and currently teaches graduate courses online for Liberty University. To date, she has published 75 books, most of them scholarly. The latest are Religion and Wollstonecraft (2024), The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism (2024), and The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture (2023).

This earnest, energetic discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft draws on the author's comprehensive knowledge of biographies of Wollstonecraft—a topic she has covered elsewhere (Betwixt and Between, 2017). In Becoming Wollstonecraft, Ayres (Liberty Univ.) organizes the biographical details of Wollstonecraft's life into three sections, each of which focuses on an aspect of her identity as it shaped her work: the importance of her birth family, her romantic relationships, and her revolutionary impulses. The strength of the book is also its weakness; thorough engagement with biographies of Wollstonecraft results in much adjudication of disputed detail, e.g. the character of Wollstonecraft's mother, the significance of a possible romance with Rev. Joshua Waterhouse, and the degree to which Wollstonecraft contributed to Gilbert Imlay's 1793 novel The Emigrants. Ayres's opinion on these and other matters is clearly, but not always, convincingly stated, which is partly due to the space allotted to the arguments of others. Still, Becoming Wollstonecraft provides readers with an entrée into the vexations attendant on reconciling the author's life and works. A useful supplement would be Sylvana Tomaselli's Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (2021), which treads some of the same ground with less hand-to-hand combat and, therefore, greater clarity of argumentation. --E. Kraft, emerita, University of Georgia

• ContentsIntroductionPart 1:Chapter 1: The Oldest Wollstonecraft Daughter: Becoming a FeministChapter 2: "Misery Haunts this House": Rescuing BessChapter 3: Wollstonecrafts' Melancholy and MadnessChapter 4: Becoming the EducatorChapter 5: A Mother of Much, Many, and More or LessPart 2:Chapter 6: "A Sexless Mind," Overstrained Sensibility, and SapphismChapter 7: Melting in and out of LoveChapter 8: Around Johnson's TableChapter 9: Barrier Love and Gilbert ImlayChapter 10: Wollstonecraft and LucretiaPart 3:Chapter 11: Utopian Dreamer, Topographical Untruths, and Imlay's Literal LiesChapter 12: Lone Traveler on the High Seas: "Lost in a Sea of Thoughts"Chapter 13: "Barren Blooming" in Britain but Germinating in AmericaChapter 14: "I am Buried Alive": Wollstonecraft's Afterbirth of Rights of Woman in BritainChapter 15: "A Thing of Shreds and Patches": Wollstonecraft's Postmortem