Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Chronology of Wollstonecraft's Life
- Introduction: The Betwixt and Between Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
- 1 William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1798): A Political Philosopher's Autobiography
- 2 Mary Hays's “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft” (1800): The Second of a New Genus
- 3 C. Kegan Paul's Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters to Imlay, with Prefatory Memoir by C. K. Paul (1879): The Victorian Gentleman
- 4 Elizabeth Robins Pennell's Mary Wollstonecraft (1884): A Victorian Feminist
- 5 Ralph M. Wardle's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (1951): Rosie- the- Riveter Wollstonecraft
- 6 Eleanor Flexner's Mary Wollstonecraft (1972): The Very Insensible Wollstonecraft
- 7 Claire Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974): Wollstonecraft with Sparkle
- 8 Emily Sunstein's A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1975): Not- so- liberated Woman
- 9 Margaret Tims's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Social Pioneer (1976): Wollstonecraft's Life: The Stuff of Novels
- 10 Gary Kelly's Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992): A Literary Revolutionary
- 11 Janet M. Todd's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000): The “Impudent and Imprudent” Wollstonecraft
- 12 Miriam Brody's Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women's Rights (2000): A Befitting Betwixt and Between Biography
- 13 Diane Jacobs's Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2001): Never Just Her Own Woman
- 14 Caroline Franklin's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life (2004): “The Education of an Educator”
- 15 Lyndall Gordon's Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2005): Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
- 16 Julie A. Carlson's England's First Family: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (2007): “Con/fusions of Fact and Fiction”
- 17 Andrew Cayton's Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793–1818 (2013): “A Subject of George III”
- 18 Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter (2015): Like Mother, Like Daughter
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
14 - Caroline Franklin's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life (2004): “The Education of an Educator”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Chronology of Wollstonecraft's Life
- Introduction: The Betwixt and Between Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
- 1 William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1798): A Political Philosopher's Autobiography
- 2 Mary Hays's “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft” (1800): The Second of a New Genus
- 3 C. Kegan Paul's Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters to Imlay, with Prefatory Memoir by C. K. Paul (1879): The Victorian Gentleman
- 4 Elizabeth Robins Pennell's Mary Wollstonecraft (1884): A Victorian Feminist
- 5 Ralph M. Wardle's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (1951): Rosie- the- Riveter Wollstonecraft
- 6 Eleanor Flexner's Mary Wollstonecraft (1972): The Very Insensible Wollstonecraft
- 7 Claire Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974): Wollstonecraft with Sparkle
- 8 Emily Sunstein's A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1975): Not- so- liberated Woman
- 9 Margaret Tims's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Social Pioneer (1976): Wollstonecraft's Life: The Stuff of Novels
- 10 Gary Kelly's Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992): A Literary Revolutionary
- 11 Janet M. Todd's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000): The “Impudent and Imprudent” Wollstonecraft
- 12 Miriam Brody's Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women's Rights (2000): A Befitting Betwixt and Between Biography
- 13 Diane Jacobs's Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2001): Never Just Her Own Woman
- 14 Caroline Franklin's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life (2004): “The Education of an Educator”
- 15 Lyndall Gordon's Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2005): Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
- 16 Julie A. Carlson's England's First Family: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (2007): “Con/fusions of Fact and Fiction”
- 17 Andrew Cayton's Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793–1818 (2013): “A Subject of George III”
- 18 Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter (2015): Like Mother, Like Daughter
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Caroline Franklin's biography is one of the sparest of the full- length biographies on Wollstonecraft. Franklin must have made the conscious determination to avoid duplication of what had been already published and to focus only on reconstructing Wollstonecraft's intellectual and political network that produced the emancipatory print culture of the late eighteenth century. Franklin perceives Wollstonecraft primarily as an autodidact, a term she attaches to Wollstonecraft and frequently repeats. Her objective is to identify those forces and people who educated Wollstonecraft, who, in turn, educated others through her writing.
On the first page of the first chapter, Franklin lets it be known that she is interested in Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's fascination with childhood and how its experiences form character. Although other writers were engaged in education reform and changes in the way that children were being raised in the eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft and Godwin—two social reformers who wrote mostly for adults—realized that reform had to begin with childrearing. It was a revolutionary idea. The prevalent attitude in the seventeenth century was that children were born of sin, that sin was passed down from the parents to child, and that it was the parents’ or nurses’ or society's jobs to beat the sin out of them (Plumb 65). Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Britain persisted in somewhat a feudal state, where every member of society knew his or her place and relationship to those above and below. Working- class families, whether they made things or grew things, all worked together, including the children, generation after generation staying in the same geographical communities. With the Enclosure Acts of the late eighteenth century and the end of cottage industry, the physical and social mobility of England's lower classes—the largest part of the population—had a pronounced effect on their perception of children, especially with the rise of public schools and Sunday Schools and their making education available to the masses. Stopping in the middle of that cataclysmic upheaval, and pondering the effect of environment instead of sin on the formation of human character, is what Franklin attributes to both Wollstonecraft and Godwin.
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- Betwixt and BetweenThe Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 159 - 168Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2017