Mary Wollstonecraft

Laura Kirkley is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. She is a comparatist and specialist in literary translation with particular expertise in British and French women’s writing of the Revolutionary era. She has published widely on Wollstonecraft, whose translations she is currently editing for the Oxford University Press edition of The Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

This ground-breaking book argues for a "cosmopolitan" Wollstonecraft whose feminist and literary personas are shaped not only by her reading of Rousseau and by the French Revolution, but by intellectual engagement with translation projects that introduced her to Continental thought. Whether as progressive educator or Rousseauvian "solitary walker," Wollstonecraft constructed herself as a gendered cosmopolitan subject committed to an ethic of caring and justice. Drawing on contemporary philosophers of cosmopolitanism such as Nussbaum and Appiah, Kirkley’s detailed and authoritative account offers a substantially new understanding of Wollstonecraft’s importance as a transnational feminist writer and thinker for her and our times.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. ‘The Most Sublime Virtues’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Personae 2. ‘Original Spirit’: Translating the Maternal Educator 3. ‘Affection for the Whole Human Race’: Wollstonecraft’s Cosmopolitan Love of Country 4. ‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’: Philanthropy and the French Revolution 5. ‘Gleams of Truth’: Transparency, Eloquence and the Language of Revolution 6. ‘Imperious Sympathies’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Traveller 7. ‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft’s Narrative of Progress Coda: ‘Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman Bibliography