If one types “Mary Wollstonecraft” as a keyword search in WorldCat, one will receive more than 17,000 hits. This is not surprising, given that she was such a historically lionized individual and that she has often been credited for being the “mother of feminism.” Nevertheless, even as early as 1976, in her preface to Mary Wollstonecraft: A Social Pioneer, Margaret Tims asks why another biography should be written on Wollstonecraft. As if anticipating the plethora of biographies and criticism that would follow in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty- first century, Tims's answer is that every biographer offers a “unique point of view” (ix).

When biographers write about a person's life, they prioritize what is important to themselves: What interests them, what resonates with them, what helps them, what teaches them, what makes sense to them and, most significantly, what advances their own political agendas, whether it is conscious or not. Their research is filtered through these lenses. Even if their biographical goal is to learn and present enough about their writers in order to better analyze a certain canon, literary critics usually begin their study from their own theoretical positions. Certainly, readers should be aware that no biographies are impartial; they bend according to their authors’ psychological makeup, cultural encoding, historical agency and political penchants. The survey of Wollstonecraft biographies in this volume demonstrates this.

Furthermore, biographies reflect the age in which they are written, more so than the age in which their subject lived. In studying the massive differences that exist in the biographies on the Romantics, for example, William St. Clair explains them as arising out of “cultural assumptions and aspirations of the time when they were written” (“Biographer” 221). This is not always a negative outcome, but a biography always imbues the portrait of the “biographee” with its own qualities so that the facsimile is never unadulterated. One can learn much about neoclassicism and romanticism by reading what Wollstonecraft's contemporaries had to say about her and her writing.