A SHORT RESIDENCE IN SWEDEN, NORWAY AND DENMARK
and
MEMOIRS OF THE AUTHOR OF ‘THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN’
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759–97) was an educationalist and feminist writer. She founded a school at Newington Green with her great friend Fanny Blood, travelled to Portugal, and worked as a governess in Ireland for Lord Kingsborough. in 1788 she settled in London as a literary journalist and translator for the publisher Joseph Johnson, becoming part of the radical set that included Paine, Blake, Godwin and the painter Fuseli. her great work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was published in 1792. She lived in Paris during the French Revolution and had a child by the American Gilbert Imlay. In 1795 she travelled through Scandinavia and later tried to commit suicide. She conceived a second daughter, the future Mary Shelley, by William Godwin, whom she married in 1797. Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth at Somers Town, London, aged thirty-eight.
WILLIAM GODWIN (1756–1836) was a philosopher and novelist. Born in East Anglia, he was educated at Hoxton Academy for the Presbyterian ministry. He became an atheist and leading radical writer, well-known in the circle including Priestley, Paine, Thelwall and Fuseli. He defended his friend Thomas Holcroft during the Treason Trials of 1794. His major work of rational anarchism, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), was followed by the novels Caleb Williams (1794), Fleetwood (1805) and Mandeville (1817), and various discursive writings including a life of Chaucer. He married Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and subsequently Mrs Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom he ran a children’s publishing business. His philosophy influenced the young Romantic writers, especially his son-in-law, the poet Shelley.
RICHARD HOLMES was born in 1945 and educated at Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit, which won the 1974 Somerset Maugham Award; Footsteps, hailed by Michael Holroyd as ‘a modern masterpiece’; Coleridge: Early Visions, which won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize; and Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He has presented biographic works of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and Rudyard Kipling for Penguin Classics and a highly praised critical study of Coleridge for Oxford Past Masters. Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1992 was made an OBE.
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MEMOIRS OF THE AUTHOR OF ‘THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN’
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A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark first published 1796
Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of The Rights of Woman first published 1798
This combined edition first published 1987
16
Introduction and Notes copyright © Richard Holmes, 1987
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90587–7
FOR TESSA
Introduction
A SHORT RESIDENCE IN SWEDEN, NORWAY, AND DENMARK
Note on the Text
Map
A SHORT RESIDENCE
Appendix
Author’s Supplementary Notes
MEMOIRS OF THE AUTHOR OF ‘THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN’
Note on the Text
Preface
MEMOIRS
Appendix (from the Second Edition)
Notes
Select Bibliography