Mary Wollstonecraft and the beginnings of female emancipation in France and England by Jacob Bouten

There is something particularly fascinating about the study of the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century, with its gradual evolution of lofty social ideals which the Revolution failed to realise. When the altered circumstances brought promotion within my reach, it completely brought me under its sway, and ultimately came to determine my choice of a subject for an inaugural dissertation. It was while engaged upon tracing the influence of Rousseau’s hopebringing theories on his English disciple William Godwin, that the less boldly assertive, but all the more humanly attractive personality of the latter’s first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, attracted my attention. My admiration of her husband’s intellect paled before my sympathy for her more modest, but at the same time more emotional character. Where the indebtedness of Godwin to Rousseau and the Encyclopedians has been manifested so clearly in different works, the absence of any direct attempt to prove and determine the extent of the relations between Mary Wollstonecraft and the early French philosophers struck me as an omission for which I found it difficult to account, and made me turn to a subject to which I am fully aware that a book of the size of the present little volume does but scant justice.