Vindication
Page 71
Slavery; enslavement of American sailors Smith, Charlotte
Smith, Joan
Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires
Society for Constitutional Information
Sothren, Mrs (Miss Godwin)
Southey, Robert
Sowerby, James
Spenser, Edmund
Staël, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Mme de
Stent, Anne
Stephen, James
Sterne, Laurence
Stone, John Hurford
Stone, Lawrence
Store Street, London
Strömstad
Swan, James
Sweden. See Backman, Carl XIV, Gothenburg, Strömstad
Swift, Jonathan
Tabart, Benjamin
Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de
Tallien, Jean-Lambert
Tasker and family
Taylor, Thomas
Tecumseh, Shawnee chief
Temple, Minny
Thompson, William
Thoreau, Henry
Thornhill, Colonel James
Thrale, Hester (later Mrs Piozzi)
Tickell, John
Tighe, Anna Laura (‘Laurette’)
Tighe, Catherine Elizabeth Ranieri (‘Nerina’) see Cini
Tighe, George William
Times, The
Times Literary Supplement
Tocqueville, Alexis de
Todd, Janet
Tomalin, Claire Tønsberg
Tooke, Horne
Treason Trials (1794)
Trelawny, Edward John
Trimmer, Sarah
Tristram Shandy, see Sterne
Turnbull, Forbes & Co.
Twain, Mark
Twiss, Francis
United Irishmen
Vaccà Berlinghieri, Andrea
Vaccà, Sophie
Vallon, Annette
Vergniaud, Pierre Victurnien
Versailles
Vesey, Mrs
Vickery, Amanda
Villeneuve, M. de
Virgil (Dido)
Viviani, Emilia
Volney, Constantin
Voltaire
Waak (sea captain)
Wakefield, Gilbert
Walker, Joseph
Walkington farm, Yorkshire
Walpole, Horace
Walworth
Washington, George: Backman appointment; ‘Circular to the States’; correspondence with Price; influence; neutrality policy; Paine’s service with; relationship with Barlow; spymaster
The Waste Land and MW’s Hamburg
Wilkinson appointment; Yale degree
Waterhouse, Joshua
Watson, James
Watts, Isaac
Wedgwood, Josiah the younger
Wedgwood, Thomas
Wedgwood family
Wesley, John
West, Benjamin
Westminster Review
Wheatcroft, John
Wheatley, Phillis
White’s Hotel, Paris
Wilberforce, William
Wilkinson, James; agents
Williams, Helen Maria: appearance; Burke’s opinion of; flight to Switzerland; imprisonment; Letters from France; meeting with MK; political views; relationship with Imlay n; relationship with MW; salon in London; salon in Paris; view of Jacobins; Wordsworth’s sonnet on
Williams, Jane
Wilmot, Catherine
Wollstonecraft, Charles (brother of MW): in
America; birth; debts; emigration to America; in
Ireland; Johnson’s appeals to; legal career; living with father; widow
Wollstonecraft, Edward (Ned, brother of MW): articled clerk; brother Charles working with; childhood; court case; debts; dispute over property; education; heir in patriarchal system; law firm; London home; management of family finances; marriage; parish church; relationship with mother; relationship with MW; sister Bess’s escape from marriage; sister Everina living with
Wollstonecraft, Edward John (father of MW): career; daughter Bess’s visits; dispute over property; drunkenness; family background; finances; Godwin on; health; in Laugharne; marriage; relationship with children; reputation; second marriage; son Charles living with; son Charles’s inheritance; violence
Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth (Dickson, mother of MW): beaten by husband; character; children; death; family background; illness; marriage; relationship with MW
Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth (Eliza, Bess, sister of MW), see Bishop
Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth (Munday, sister-in-law of MW)
Wollstonecraft, Everina (sister of MW): birth; character; death; emigration plan; finances; letters from MW; letters from sister Bess; living with brother Ned; meeting with Godwin; MW’s death; Newington Green school; in Paris; relationship with Godwin; relationship with mother; relationship with niece Fanny; relationship with sister MW; sister Bess’s escape; teaching career; translations
Wollstonecraft, Henry Woodstock (brother of MW)
Wollstonecraft, James (brother of MW): arrested in Paris; birth; character; debts; gossip; naval career; relationship with MW; study of mathematics
Wollstonecraft, Lydia (stepmother of MW)
Wollstonecraft, Mary:
LIFE: family background; birth; christening; childhood; education; companion to Mrs Dawson; flirtations; nursing her dying mother; mother’s death; living with Blood family; sister Bess’s marriage; plans Bess’s escape; in hiding with Bess; school in Newington Green; voyage to Lisbon; Fanny’s death; return from Lisbon; first book (Thoughts on the Education of Daughters); journey to Ireland; governess to King family; first novel (Mary, A Fiction); with King family in Dublin; dismissal; move to London; staying with Johnson; decides on writing career; visiting family; house in George Street; life in London; publications; translations; reviewing; Vindication of the Rights of Men; first meeting with Godwin; Vindication of the Rights of Woman; plans for brothers and sisters; move to Store Street; first meetings with Barlows; proposal to move in with Fuselis; journey to Paris; arrival in Paris; social contacts in Paris; first meeting with Imlay; developing relationship with Imlay; move to Neuilly-sur-Seine; writing history of French Revolution; status as Imlay’s wife; return to Paris; first pregnancy; in Paris during the Terror; move to Le Havre; birth of daughter Fanny; motherhood; treasure ship venture; return to Paris; in Paris without Imlay; return to England; house in Charlotte Street; first suicide attempt; mission to Scandinavia; journey to Gothenburg; investigations in Scandinavia; Travels; journey to Hamburg; return to England; second suicide attempt; ultimatum to Imlay; proposal of marriage; encounters with Imlay; move to Cumming Street; visits Godwin; developing relationship with Godwin; move to Judd Place West; second novel (The Wrongs of Woman); love affair with Godwin; second pregnancy; marriage to Godwin; social status; Godwin’s journey to the Midlands; ‘Lessons’ for Fanny; birth of daughter Mary; death; funeral; grave; biographies
MONEY: brother Ned’s meanness; debts; debts repaid by mystery donor; earnings as governess; earnings from writing; Imlay’s promises; loans from Cowie; loss of fortune; marriage to Godwin; need to work; Newington Green school; in Paris; support of Blood family; support of family
PERSON: and American ideals; and marriage; belief in cleanliness; childcare; compassion; contradictions in character; depression; desire; domestic; domestic affections; dress; educational theories, and sex education; energy; expression; eyes; hair; health; home at centre of education, (see domestic affections); hypochondria; independence; language; manners; melancholy; moods; music; need for friendship; non-violence; passion; politics; portraits; reading; religion; reputation; roles; Romanticism; self-pity; stays; voice
RELATIONSHIPS: female friendships, see Arden (Jane), Barlow (Ruth), Blood (Fanny), Hays (Mary), King (Margaret); love affairs, see Godwin (William), Imlay (Gilbert); male friendships, see Fuseli (Henry), Godwin (William), Hewlett (Revd John), Johnson (Joseph), Ogle (George), Price (Dr Richard)
WORKS: ‘The Cave of Fancy�
��; Education of Daughters; Elements of Morality (translation); The Female Reader; Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; ‘Lessons’ for Fanny; Letters (with some redating); ‘Letters from the Revolution’; ‘Letters on the Management of Infants’; Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman; Mary; On the Importance of Religious Opinions (translation); Original Stories from Real Life; Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; Travels (A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark); A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Wrongs of Woman (link with Frankenstein)
Wollstonecraft, Mary (American sister-in-law of MW)
Woman’s nature; desires; independence and reason .
Woolf, Leonard
Woolf, Virginia : counter-history; great-grandmother (see Anne Stent); married life; on MW; publication; on the ‘true nature of woman’
Wordsworth, Dorothy
Wordsworth, William: flight from France; ‘music of humanity’; Prelude; publication; quoted; spied upon; ‘spirit’
World Anti-Slavery Convention (1840)
Wulfsberg, Jacob: career; character; defence lawyers’ objection to; judge appointed by Royal Commission; indignation at corrupt lawyers; meeting with MW; relationship with Backman; support for MW
Young, Arthur
Young, Edward
Zannetti, Ferdinando
Zannetti (music master)
About the Author
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, LYNDALL GORDON is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James. Her work has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography and the Cheltenham Prize for Literature. She has also published a memoir, Shared Lives, about growing up in South Africa in the 1950s. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Senior Research Fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She lives in Oxford.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
PRAISE FOR
Vindication
“[An] imaginative and intelligent, consistently absorbing reinterpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft…. [Gordon] speculates and probes with a freewheeling intelligence that responds to Wollstonecraft’s own.”
—New York Review of Books
“Gordon relates Wollstonecraft’s story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified…. [She] tackles this formidable woman with grace, clarity, and much new research…. Wonderful, and deeply sobering…. Gordon’s book is worthy of its subject.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Fierce and wonderful…. Lyndall Gordon glides on silver oars over the deep waters of English lit, dipping here into letters, there into polemic, yonder a novel or a memoir. She seems to have moved into Mary’s apartments, even to have put on her skin. But she is also reading her as a dazzling character on the brilliant page.”
—John Leonard, Harper’s
“The tedious question thrown at biographers—‘Do we need another book about…?’—is demolished by Gordon’s adventurous scholarship…. [Her] fresh approach places this early feminist in the context of the American and French Revolutions…. [An] exhaustively researched biography.”
—Brenda Maddox, Washington Post Book World
“One of the many triumphs of Gordon’s biography is that it makes Wollstonecraft’s emerging life of the mind every bit as thrilling as her belatedly tumultuous life of the body…. A captivating portrait not of a strident feminist nor a bluestocking but, as Gordon asserts, a rational and vulnerable visionary who had the courage to try to map out, in her work and in her life, a blueprint for human change.”
—Fresh Air, National Public Radio
“Exceptional, emotionally overwhelming…. A 360-degree exploration of Wollstonecraft in her era—and beyond. To [Gordon], Wollstonecraft ‘was not a born genius; she became one.’ What interests Gordon is how she did so and at what cost, to herself and to others.”
—Newsday
“Gordon offers fresh detail and insight…. [She] succeeds admirably in showing readers how this independent, compassionate woman who devised a blueprint for human change achieved that distinction…. Deeply documented with Wollstonecraft’s writing, contemporary memoirs, letters, and archival materials, Gordon’s biography is eminently readable and rewarding.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] vigorous biography…. Gordon has brought the good-hearted, deeply insightful Wollstonecraft forward into the greater light she deserves.”
—Tennessean
“A sobering and inspirational read for women today. Readers who delve into it will meet a brave, visionary woman they are not likely to forget.”
—Richmond Times Dispatch
“In the hands of this seasoned biographer, Mary Wollstonecraft is a better character, more rounded and complex…. Thanks to Lyndall Gordon’s illuminating book, it should be a long time before Wollstonecraft next slips into darkness.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Rich with new interpretations, sources, and detail…. Captures the drama of Wollstonecraft’s life.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Gordon shows how the supposedly worst aspects of her subject are inseparable from the best…. [Wollstonecraft’s] aspirations to greatness, and her desire to make herself known, keep breaking through Ms. Gordon’s wonderfully wrought book like flashes of lightning.”
—New York Sun
“A riveting page-turner…. The reader is drawn directly into Wollstonecraft’s struggle…. From this beautifully written book, Wollstonecraft emerges as a triumphant success, despite all adversity and slights of fate…. Gordon’s biographical method is exciting.”
—The Times (London)
“An outstanding, rigorously researched intellectual biography.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Also by Lyndall Gordon
T. S. ELIOT: AN IMPERFECT LIFE
VIRGINIA WOOLF: A WRITER’S LIFE
SHARED LIVES (A MEMOIR)
CHARLOTTE BRONTË: A PASSIONATE LIFE
A PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY JAMES:
TWO WOMEN AND HIS ART
Copyright
VINDICATION. Copyright © 2005 by Lyndall Gordon. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition JUNE 2007 ISBN: 9780061866005
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*There are no numbered notes. For the reader who
wants to know more, the source notes, starting on p. 456, contain additional material on contexts and issues.
*An undergraduate who received an allowance from the college, enabling him to study. A sizar used to perform certain duties now performed by college servants.
*Ballet, developed in the eighteenth century, retains that lift of the diaphragm and tightened hips, setting off the carriage of head and arms.
*In Roman law it was illegal: nullum sine dote fiat conjugium (let no marriage be made without a dowry). If the bride’s family could not pay the groom, the marriage could not take place, and previous understandings were nullified. Olwyn Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500–1800 (1997).
*This would now be diagnosed as postpartum depression, but the label belies continued ignorance about this condition. Most cases would recover, but not all: for instance, in the 1840s Thackeray’s wife fell into depression after the birth of her second child, and remained in an asylum for the rest of her life.
*In truth, Lord Mansfield had been a protector of property and no friend to slaves. He had intended his ruling in favour of freedom in the case of one man (who actively opposed his enslavement on British soil) to have no repercussions for slavery in general, but many slaves had taken the following judgement as a cue to leave their owners: ‘no Master ever was allowed here to take a Slave by force to be sold abroad, because he had deserted from his Service, or for any other Reason whatever; we cannot say the Cause set forth by this Return [of a man to slavery] is allowed or approved of by the Laws of this Kingdom…’.
*Jane Austen too was less than submissive to Fordyce. His Sermons to Young Women is the book Mr Collins insists on reading aloud to the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice.
*College in the sense of a resident community. A dated stone says August 1780, but construction had begun well before.
*Caroline inherited her lands in 1761 at the age of seven, from her King grandfather through her mother Margaret, who died in 1763. Margaret had been the daughter and heiress of James, Lord Kingston of Mitchelstown Castle. Caroline’s father was Colonel the Right Hon. Richard FitzGerald of Mount Offaly, Co. Kildare. She was mistress of her lands for her lifetime, after which they were to go to her eldest son.