Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary WollstonecraftProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.9
Word count
530K words
Chapters
53

Tags

English Originals Western Philosophy Human NatureHumanistic CareIntellectual EnlightenmentSocial CritiqueWestern ThoughtMoral DilemmaIntellectual CommentarySelf-ReflectionFeminismFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of WomanAuthor: Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Oct 29, 2007

Editor's review

This is a posthumous collection of the author's uncollected writings, assembled and published after Wollstonecraft's death. It gathers unfinished fiction fragments, letters, and miscellaneous essays rather than forming a single, fully structured work. Its value lies in showing readers a side of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman beyond her polemical prose: the private tone of her letters and the emotional detail in her fiction fragments add layers not easily visible in her formal treatises. Readers should adjust their expectations for such posthumous material—it lacks the tightly argued structure of a monograph, and the fragments are not连贯. Precisely for that reason, it conveys a vivid sense of the author's thinking and writing process. For readers who have already read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and wish to understand the full range of her writing, this collection is a meaningful supplement; for those encountering the author for the first time, it is better to start with her major work and return here later. It can be read as a collection of materials, browsed by genre rather than forced from beginning to end.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the major work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman first, then return to this collection and browse it by genre.
  2. Read the letters and the fiction fragments separately to sense the difference in tone between genres.
  3. There is no need to read straight through; when a fragment breaks off, move on to the next group of materials.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this a complete work or a posthumous collection? It is a posthumous collection assembled and published after the author's death, containing unfinished fiction fragments, letters, and miscellaneous essays—not a single, fully structured work.
Can I read this without having read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? You can, but your depth of understanding will suffer. Much of the posthumous material relates to the author's intellectual trajectory, so it is advisable to read her major work first and use this collection as supplementary material.
Are the fiction fragments in the posthumous papers complete? No. These fiction fragments are mostly unfinished drafts with interrupted plots and incomplete structure; they should be read as writing materials rather than finished fiction.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Mary Wollstonecraft Author · United Kingdom · 1759–1797

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was an English writer and philosopher, and one of the founders of feminism. She was born in London on 27 April 1759 and died on 10 September 1797, after childbirth. Her best-known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), argues that women should enjoy equal rights to education with men and is regarded as a milestone of the women's movement. Her other works include Mary: A Fiction, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, her love letters to Gilbert Imlay, and a posthumous collection. Her daughter was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Her writing spans political argument, fiction and letters, and is marked by a sharp, reflective style that has deeply influenced later debate on women's education and rights.