An exploration of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings: Mary, a fiction and letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft (1756-1796) is the pioneer of western feminist tradition,whose influence crossed all national boundaries. As a popular feminist writer, Mary Wollstonecraft has been very influential in her writings as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) where she stated that to break the conventional rules of the society and think out of the box. In our feminism course or other woman’s writing we usually start with Mary Wollstonecraft, we hardly complete all the chapters of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and we tend to forget that she has other literary product like novels, letters and short stories also. This dissertation attempts to examine the representation of liberal feminism in the light of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and other literary works. In this paper, I am going to explore Mary Wollstonecraft as a liberal feminist writer and analyse her Vindication on woman rights because of its emphasis on women’s education and individuals. I will also analyse her first complete novel Mary: A Fiction (1788)where Mary the protagonist, who deals with her social and private relationships. I have also taken her most talked about personal narrative travel letters of eighteenth century, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1797) through which we can establish Wollstonecraft as an artist of nature. In additional these texts, relative journals, articles and other textbooks are used as secondary sources for this research.