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Speaking for herself

The breadth of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work
by
May 2021, no. 431

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, passion, and politics by Sylvana Tomaselli

Princeton University Press, $54.99 hb, 237 pp

Speaking for herself

The breadth of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work
by
May 2021, no. 431

The first statue commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), a swirling tower of forms coalescing into a single naked figure at its apex by British artist Maggi Hambling, was unveiled in London last year. Responding to accusations that the statue was ‘mad’ and ‘insulting’, Hambling defended it as ‘not a conventional heroic or heroinic likeness’ but ‘a sculpture about it now’. Against such dehistoricisation, Sylvana Tomaselli’s intellectual biography of the late eighteenth-century philosopher seeks to recover the historical Wollstonecraft. Tomaselli, the Sir Harry Hinsley Lecturer in History at St John’s College, Cambridge, has been writing on women in the late eighteenth century since the mid-1980s.

David Kearns reviews 'Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, passion, and politics' by Sylvana Tomaselli

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, passion, and politics

by Sylvana Tomaselli

Princeton University Press, $54.99 hb, 237 pp

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