1 'A Genius Will Educate Itself': Mary Wollstonecraft As Autodidact
Notes 1 ‘A genius will educate itself’: Mary Wollstonecraft as Autodidact 1. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, eds Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Ontario and Letchworth, Herts: Broadview Press, 2001), p. 44. Henceforth cited in parenthesis as MAVRW. 2. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering, 1989), 1: 124. All quotations are taken from this edition and will henceforth be cited in parenthesis. 3. Letterpress copy of letter dated 11 January, 1798. Abinger Archive. Dep.b.227/8. 4. See Matthew Mercer, ‘Dissenting Academies and the Education of the Laity, 1750–1850’, History of Education, 30:1 (2001), 35–58; and William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 8–9. 5. Abinger Archive, Dep.b.214/3. 6. I am indebted to Michael Franklin for tracing the quotations except for William King, which was provided in Janet Todd’s The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 2. The latter only came out as this book was being revised. 7. Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), p. 86. 8. Susan Gubar, ‘Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of “It takes One to Know One”’, Feminist Studies 20:3 (1994), 453–73. 9. See Stuart Brown’s entry in The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philos- ophers, eds John W. Yolton, John Valdimir Price and John Stephens (Bristol and Sterling, Virginia: Thoemmes Press, 1999), 2, 872–4.
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