Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: summary in 30 seconds : Free Summarizer

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

William Godwin · biographical memoir, 1798·2 hrs in the original·original at gutenberg.org

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A hard early life shaped her character: Wollstonecraft grew up under a tyrannical, financially reckless father and a cold mother, experiences that forged her fierce independence and led her, from her teens onward, to support herself and her siblings through work as a companion, schoolteacher, and governess.
Literary fame arrived suddenly: After years of anonymous hack work for her publisher Joseph Johnson, she wrote her reply to Burke's Reflections in weeks, then produced A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in just six weeks, a book Godwin judges likely to be read as long as the English language endures.
The Imlay affair brought her to the edge of destruction: Her relationship with the American Gilbert Imlay in Paris gave her the domestic happiness she had long craved, but his gradual desertion drove her to two suicide attempts, the second a deliberate leap from Putney Bridge, from which she was rescued.
Her partnership with Godwin was the happiest period of her life: After finally breaking with Imlay in early 1796, she and Godwin developed a mutual love that both described as friendship melting into love; they eventually married quietly in March 1797 when she became pregnant, and Godwin records those final months as ones of genuine serenity and creative productivity.
She died of childbed fever at thirty-eight: Following the birth of her daughter Mary on 30 August 1797, retained fragments of placenta caused a fatal infection, and despite days of attentive medical care she died on 10 September 1797, leaving Godwin to describe the loss as an intellectual light extinguished forever.

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•Why it earns a slot

This memoir is the primary biographical source for Mary Wollstonecraft's life and the first document to disclose, without apology, her suicide attempts, her illegitimate child, and her unmarried cohabitation, making it a landmark in both the history of biography and the history of feminist thought.

William Godwin traces the life of his late wife Mary Wollstonecraft from her difficult childhood under a volatile father through her struggles for independence, her literary career, her passionate and ultimately disastrous relationship with Gilbert Imlay, and her final happy months with Godwin himself. The memoir ends with a detailed account of her death from complications following childbirth in September 1797, and a tribute to her intellectual character. Godwin wrote it as an act of public justice to a woman he believed had been misrepresented, presenting her life with unusual candor about her illegitimate child, her suicide attempts, and her unmarried cohabitation.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.

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Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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