As highlighted in the chapters in Flexner, second- wave feminists enthusiastically appropriated the works of women in the past, especially of Wollstonecraft, to support their causes during the turbulent, anti establishment decade of the 1970s. Academe was beginning to reassess literature by women that previously had been stigmatized, marginalized and largely ignored. In 1985 Jane Tompkins challenged a traditionally patriarchal system in academe and in the publishing industry, one that dismissed women's writing and refused to include it in “the canon”; therefore, it was not printed in anthologies that were taught in colleges and universities. Tompkins analyzed the bias and the value system that was in place that negated nearly all literature not written by white, Anglo- Saxon, Protestant males. The 1990s would see the beginnings of a recovery movement when people such as Angela Leighton wrote Victorian Woman Poets: Writing Against the Heart, which reclaimed many female poets who had been excluded from anthologies. I published Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change in 2001 and Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers in 2003.

In the 1970s and the decades that followed, the market called for republication of women writers and biographical information about them. The political demand sometimes outdistanced the attention to quality literature and rigorous writing and research. However, Claire Tomalin focused on facts, and instead of embellishing them with unsupported suppositions of Wollstonecraft's interiority to advance a political agenda, Tomalin was a more reliable detective with the nose of a historian, even if she studied English literature at Cambridge. After her work with Wollstonecraft, she would devote her life to journalism and biographies. As a journalist, she would have disciplined herself to stating facts that could be proved, and avoided assumptions that could not be proved, but in her biography, at times, she does not provide enough documentation. Still, she tries to form her assessments as an objective journalist. For example, she declares Rights of Woman “a book without any logical structure” (105). She does not evaluate it as a good or bad thing; it is what it is. She adds: “It is more in the nature of an extravaganza.” Again, she does not comment on this aspect. “What it lacks in method,” she suggests, “it makes up for in élan, and it is better to dip into than to read through at a sitting” (105).