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Mary Wollstonecraft |
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Mary Wollstonecraft's main claim to the attention of posterity rests on her radical critique of patriarchal rule, in its public and private forms, in the England of her day. She gained contemporary fame by being one of the first to answer Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) with her A Vindication of the Rights of Men , written and printed in less than a month in late 1790. She followed this with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a work that has made her a patron saint of feminism. Compared with these polemical works, her two novels--Mary: A Fiction (1788) and the unfinished and posthumously published The Wrongs of Woman (1799)--are of lesser significance and, even as literature, inferior to her remarkable Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Yet in two senses her writings are all of a piece: they seek moral and social improvement and thus stem from an Enlightenment faith in human perfectibility; and they derive from the conditions and vicissitudes of her extraordinary life.
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