Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - Walpole called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.
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Über den Autor Mary Wollstonecraft
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Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter. He has published widely for both academic and popular readerships, and among his many books are The Forger's Shadow (Picador 2002), The Union Jack (Atlantic 2006, rev. edn 2017), The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2012), The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year (Atlantic 2014), and editions of a variety of eighteenth-century texts, from crime writing to Shakespeare. He has edited Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (2014), Matthew Lewis's The Monk (2016), and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (2017) for Oxford World's Classics.
