Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft Paperback – Illustrated, 2 May 2006

A superb biography of a truly extraordinary pioneer. Examining the available source material with a perceptive imagination and presenting in a sympathetic though far from uncritical light Woolstonecrafts heroic struggles to be consistent in her inner and outer life, Gordon succeeds in bringing alive a real flesh and blood woman; one who if she walked the streets of London or Paris today would appear as radical and unconventional as she did 200 years ago, it seems to me.

I've read some rubbish in my life, but this takes the biscuit.

This is an interesting read but is fairly light, and certainly not particularly scholarly. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of The Vindication of the Rights of Man and, more famously, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as well as mother to Mary Shelley, is smoothed out here, and glossed over I felt, so that her more prickly and awkward sides are played down. Ironically, this makes Wollstonecraft far more `feminine' than I suspect, from her writings, she actually was - something which she herself would probably have hated.Gordon tackles Wollstonecraft's childhood but makes less of her difficult relationship with her mother than the Tomalin biography. It also seems to erode some of her more tempestuous relationships: those with women as well as with the various lovers she had. The social and political context around the French Revolution is done well as the setting for Wollstonecraft's most famous writings, however.The last part of the book moves from Wollstonecraft to her so-called `legacy': her daughters, and rather randomly, a list of writers who were `influenced' by her to write about women - questionable on all kinds of counts.So this is an enjoyable read if you're looking for a good story about an interesting woman. I disagree with Gordon's premise, however, that Wollstonecraft (or anyone else) can be `ahead of their time', and some of the more hagiographical elements are irritating. This is probably of greater value to the general reader rather than the Wollstonecraft student.