Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792-1904: A Revisionist Reception History

• Published in: History of European ideas 2013-07, Vol.39 (4), p.503-527
• Main Author: Botting, Eileen Hunt
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Autobiographical Materials; comparative political thought; Countermovements; England; Europe; Feminism; Feminist Theory; Great Britain; Husbands; Intellectuals; Nineteenth Century; Politics; reception history; Reputation; Right Wing Politics; Rights; Translation; Wollstonecraft; women's rights; Womens Rights
• ISSN: 0191-6599; 1873-541X
• DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2012.725668

It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century-drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sources, and Wollstonecraft scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present-this article applies a revised Rezeptionsgeschichte approach to tracing her intellectual influence on the woman question and organised feminism in Europe. Although the Memoirs and post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove underground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft's reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe, like the United States, was more positive and sustained in comparison to the public backlash she faced as a 'fallen woman' in her homeland of Britain through the bulk of the Victorian era.