Mary Wollstonecraft's most enduring work is her life. Born the daughter of a drunk of a father, she sometimes slept on the landing to shield her mother from his blows; yet that mother sent her out to be suckled, keeping her own milk only for the adored elder brother, Ned, who inherited all that was going in the way of cash and education.
Righteous indignation was lit in her heart early, then, and it built to an inferno as she grew up to take the only jobs available to her as a poor and patchily educated woman: jobbing teacher, lady's companion, governess. This last calling brought her to Ireland, a place which had always beckoned to her imagination (her mother's family was from Donegal). She obtained a post with the Lord and Lady Kingsborough, and holed up in their Palladian mansion beneath the Galtees. But imagine the jangling of her sensibilities, as she trod the difficult path of the half-servant, half-gentlewoman. Even when she hit the Kingsboroughs' Dublin house - which her 1974 biographer, Claire Tomalin, described as being in Merrion Square but Janet Todd, her latest biographer, gives as being in Henrietta Street - and could receive male visitors in her own parlour, she looked doomed to exist without physical intimacy for the rest of her life.
Mary was a fighter, however. Fired by the Kingsboroughs, she determined to be what she called "the first of a new genus" and to live by her pen in London, encouraged by the publisher Joseph Johnson. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, she let the fire of her indignation at the constraints of her own life run riot and illumine her sense of the wrongs of her sex. She set the heart of feminism ticking with her vision of marriage for property as a kind of "legal prostitution"; she brilliantly described how women were demeaned by having no other competition other than the marriage stakes, which set them against each other; forlornly she described the plight of women "fashionably educated, but without a fortune". For me, it is the great, and the only essential feminist text.
The work, one of the flood which came in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, made her notorious. However, her real trouble stemmed from the fact that she was too passionate to live without love. Her love for Blake's illustrator, Henry Fuseli, made her ridiculous, but her love for the American writer and businessman, Gilbert Imlay, went further. They made love as the French Revolution raged around them, but she faced her own Terror when she found she was pregnant. As Imlay wandered off, her life illustrates in primary colours how "liberty, equality and fraternity" translate differently for men and women; 200 years later, they still do.
There were endless imploring letters and two suicide attempts. Janet Todd sees in this behaviour the culmination of the self-dramatisation in which Wollstonecraft indulged all her life. Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia, she analyses Wollstonecraft's narrative persona, judging, for instance, that she returned to the romantic "I" in Letters Written Dur- ing a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark because it had gone down so well in the Vindication.
While there is no doubt but that Wollstonecraft was given permission to write as "I" by the prevailing literary culture, I think Todd overestimates her premeditation. Todd deconstructs Wollstonecraft's personality in a way which seems to falsify it - most emotions are felt along with a contradicatory emotion, after all. She speaks of Wollstonecraft's "ambivalence" about motherhood, when in fact her descriptions of her daughter Fanny give us a rare glimpse of a child at a time when such a being was rarely considered worthy of words, and judges she may have been "unsuitable" for domestic life, when she seems to have craved it. She wrote her Original Stories for Fanny: "You were seven months without teeth, always sucking. But after you got one, you began to gnaw a crust of bread. It was not long before another came pop . . . So I said to papa, it is time the little girl should eat . . . " Sadly, Papa was soon nowhere to be found.
Todd gives a fuller account of Wollstonecraft's contemporary context than did Tomalin in The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. The life fascinates more than the work, however, and Tomalin's remains the great account of that life, which posed more questions for women than it answered. That she died following childbirth seems horribly apt, especially as the fatal infection was probably introduced by a male surgeon reaching into her womb for the placenta with unwashed hands.
Her child with William Godwin, was, of course, Mary Shelley, whose nightmare of childbirth was Frankenstein. And unlike Todd, Tomalin provides the necessary epilogue, the last acts in the tragedy, which has Mary Shelley desperately dampening originality in her son ("Oh God, teach him to think like other people") - and little toothy daughter Fanny Imlay writing a suicide note explaining that she has chosen to die because her birth was "unfortunate".
Victoria White is Arts Editor of The Irish Times