SOURCE: "Sensibility and the 'Walk of Reason': Mary Wollstonecraft's Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique," in Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics; Essays in Honor of Jean H. Hagstrum, edited by Syndy McMillen Conger, Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickoinson University Press, 1990, pp. 120-44.

In the essay that follows, Myers examines Wollstonecraft's writings for the Analytical Review as attempts by Wollstonecraft to develop her unique voice as a "theorist of gender," particularly as she attempts to combine sensibility and reason into a broader humanism.

This is a vast commonplace of literature: the Woman copies the Book. In other words, every body is a citation: of the "already-written." The origin of desire is the statue, the painting, the book.…

—Roland Barthes, S/Z

I feel all a mother's fears for the swarm of little ones which surround me, and observe disorders, without...