5/8/2023 0 Comments Wollstonecraft![]() ![]() Take note, ladies!Įven Wollstonecraft’s friends and allies stepped back silenced, shaking their heads. She was a trouble-maker, and she died a woman’s death. ![]() This was poetry functioning as an 18th-century Twitter: mocking Wollstonecraft as a “poor maniac” a “voluptuous” victim of “licentious love.” The author also crowed that “she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable.” In that oldest of misogynistic chestnuts: she was asking for it. ![]() Scurrilous poems did the rounds, including an exceptionally unpleasant piece of work called The Un-sex’d Females. Wollstonecraft’s enemies couldn’t contain their glee: here was proof irrefutable that she was a whore, a “hyena in petticoats” as Horace Walpole described her. The shockwaves were massive, and lasting. And in doing so, he unwittingly brought about Wollstonecraft’s second death: her reputation was killed in the scandal following the revelation of her unconventional life and loves. Godwin, still grieving, wrote her first biography. She left behind two daughters and a devastated husband, the anarchist philosopher William Godwin. First in childbirth, bringing the author Mary Shelley into the world – the agonising post-partum infection took 10 days to finish her off. But Wollstonecraft died not one, but two deaths. ![]()
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