To comfort himself and ostensibly to present his wife to the world as a strong, independent woman who lived by her own rules, Wollstonecraft’s husband wrote and then published Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” four months after her death. The brief and candid biography revealed to the world that the celebrated proselytizer of virtue and excellence had conceived two daughters out of wedlock and attempted two suicides.

From thenceforth the events in her life and her life choices would overshadow the ideas in her work. As Cora Kaplan observed, “Curiously, for an author-activist adept in many genres—a career to which many feminists have aspired—up until the last quarter-century Wollstonecraft’s life has been read much more closely than her writing, which has sometimes seemed a mere pretext for telling and retelling her personal story” (2002, 247). It is true that ever since academe has embraced the cause of feminism, Wollstonecraft’s work has received much more critical attention than it had in the past. However, it is also true that what seems to continue to interest readers about Wollstonecraft is her life more than her works. Rarely does one find a critical book or article that focuses only on her work; most critics do not separate her ideas from her life.

Unfortunately, because of Memoirs, Wollstonecraft became “an object lesson on the dangers of feminist ideas and ideals—as if a woman could not live in the world, she advocated but had no problems in the one she opposed” (Davidson 1986, 132). Reviews, poems, essays, and sermons were written to denounce her, similar to the view published in The European Magazine and London Review:

A Presbyterian theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary conceded that Rights of Woman was ingenious, but her “licentious practice renders her memory odious to every friend of virtue” (Miller 1803, 284).