Introduction: The Female Philosopher

Abstract

The Introduction discusses Mary Wollstonecraft’s rise to prominence as a female philosopher through the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and puts her work into two contexts: that of reaction in Britain to the Revolution in France, and of the rise of women’s involvement in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. The Introduction makes the claim that, in response to the attacks on Wollstonecraft after her death, her less radical contemporaries—Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen—created a series of afterlives for her, thereby using the non-parodic female philosopher and the resources of the novel to refurbish feminist thought for a more conservative age