SOURCE: "Brockden Brown and the Rights of Women," in University of Texas Bulletin, No. 2212, March 22, 1922, pp. 5-44.

In the following excerpt, Clark studies Brown's ideas regarding the rights of women, particularly in Alcuin, and maintains that the impact of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin on Brown has been too strenuously emphasized by many critics.

One cannot correctly appraise the literature dealing with the social and political emancipation of women in the last third of the eighteenth century without some knowledge of the evolution of the thought of which that literature is a record. Particularly is this so in evaluating the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Brockden Brown. It is too generally assumed that the first two were the originators of the social theories that are now so invariably associated with their names; and that their work in turn inspired Brockden Brown in America...