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Intended as the first of three volumes, the H istorical and M oral View stands as the longest and most meticulous of Wollstonecraft's writings. It is one she seemed to value highly. She described this work in a letter to Eliza Bishop as “a great book”.^^ Nevertheless, the H istorical and M oral View is conspicuous as the most neglected of Wollstonecraft's mature writings. After its initial publication in 1794, it was given a second edition in the following year, and then remained out of print until Janet Todd's facsimile edition in 1975 . At the time o f writing it is only available outside copyright libraries as selections in anthologies, and in Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler's seven volume Works o f M ary Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft's biographer, Claire Tomalin, offers a clue to the relative critical and editorial indifference towards this work:

The interest of the H istorical and M oral View o f the French Revolution is not the factual element, since the narrative breaks

Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography (New York: Coward, McGaim & Geoghegan, 1971), p. 195.

The fact that Wollstonecraft intended (and signposted this intention in her “Advertisement” ) to write “two or three more volumes” on the Revolution, which would inevitably have had to cover the events of

1793, is interesting to this argument. The absence of the beheaded King from this volume, and the subsequent failure to produce later volumes which might have contained reference to this, might simply be a re-enactment of her failure or unwillingness to write about a beheaded King (Works o f Mary

Wollstonecraft, vol. 6, p. 5). It is equally interesting that she described the Letter on the Present

character o f the French Nation as “introductory to a series”, but no evidence exists of her continuing this project (Works o f Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 6, p. 443). I am speculating on the context in which such an absence is possible or necessary.

off before the date of her arrival in France, and she gives no sources for her information; it is largely in its sidelong glances at her own experience, and in the passages where she tried to formulate her political faith.

Camilla Jebb in 1912 said something very similar of this work:

For latter-day readers the chief value o f the book lies in the vivid descriptions, by an eye-witness, of Paris at that terrible period.^ Tomalin and Jebb - in spite o f the distance between them - both emphasise the (rare) personal insights available from this, Wollstonecraft's most impersonal piece o f writing. The editors ofyt M ary Wollstonecraft Reader in 1983 voiced a similar preoccupation with evidence o f Wollstonecraft's life, suggesting (as Tomalin does above) that a lack of

personal or biographical insight is reason enough for judging this work to be a failure:

Since most o f the volume reviews what had taken place prior to her arrival in Paris in December 1792 [...] and since it lacks the

eyewitness view of events (and of women's participation in them) that the author of A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman seemed so fortunately situated to provide, it fails to justify its length.^"^

Margaret Tims offers a curt thumbs-down: “Mary's detailed reconstruction of events preceding the outbreak o f the Revolution [...] is o f no particular interest except to the professional h i s t o r i a n . E m i l y Sunstein in a biography published a year earlier complains that “[t]he book never comes to life” and finds in 522 pages o f writing only two passages interesting enough to quote, on the grounds that they reflect “her current personal situation”. M a r i l y n Butler’s chronology o f significant writings and events between 1760-1830 appended to her influential study of Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries

Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death o f Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 170.

Camilla Jebb, M ary Wollstonecraft (London: Herbert & Daniel, 1912), p. 152.

^^4 Mary Wollstonecraft Reader, ed. by Barbara H. Solomon & Paula S. Berggren (New York: New American Library, 1983), p. 366.

^^Margaret Tims, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Social Pioneer (London: Millington, 1976), p.232.

^^mily Sunstein, A Different Face: The Life o f Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 255-6.

mentions Wollstonecraft’s two Vindications but makes no mention of the H istorical and M oral View.

A tendency to ignore or downgrade the Historical and M oral View can be understood as one aspect o f the influence on Wollstonecraft studies of late liberal feminism. Recent biographers and commentators, concerned to uphold a version of Wollstonecraft as a social pioneer for women's liberty, tend to prioritise those writings foregrounding aspects o f her life which show her as martyred or strident. At the same time a tendency to fix attention on Wollstonecraft’s life itself - either in the form of feminist heroine or feminine icon - is often in fact a tendency to fix attention on Wollstonecraft’s erotic life, namely her relationships with Fuseli, Imlay and Godwin. The Historical and M oral View is not apparently interesting to either o f these perspectives. Its reception in the decades after its publication, however, was generally favourable, with one anonymous commentator claiming that “in judiciousness o f general remark as an analysis of political events, and correctness of historical narrative” the H istorical and M oral View is “not second to the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.

Gary Kelly, in the course of offering a rare modern celebration o f this work, places his assessment of its writing in a careful and detailed analysis of the writer’s personal life, in particular o f the relationship with Gilbert Imlay, which he claims

“transformed Wollstonecraft”.^^ Kelly sets the background to this work as a time during

^^Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 190. Virginia Sapiro thinks the View is “one of her most interesting but least successful efforts” (Vindication o f Political Virtue, p. 34), while Alison Ravetz appears to stand alone in describing it as “one of her most successful pieces of writing”; see Ahson Ravetz, ‘The Trivialisation of Mary Wollstonecraft: A Personal and Political Career Re-Vindicated’,

Women's Studies International Forum, 6 (1983), 481-500, p.481.

Defense o f the Character and Conduct o f the Late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Founded on Principles o f Nature and Reason, as Applied to the Peculiar Circumstances o f her Case; in a Series o f Letters to a Lady (London: James Wallis, 1803), p. 67 (original emphasis), Analytical Review, 20 (September- December 1794), 337-347 and 21 (January-June 1795), 396-397 for favourable reviews of the Historical and Moral View. The British Critic accused Wollstonecraft of lifting her facts and statistics from the New Annual Register, and provided detailed comparisons of passages to uphold its claim, see British Critic, 6

(1795), 29-36. The Critical Review questions her style, and describes the work as turgid’, see Critical Review, 16 (1796), 390-396. The Monthly Review, 16 (January-April 1795), 393-402 gives a favourable account as does the New Annual Register (1794), 221-222.

Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, p. 148. Further references will be given after quotations in the text. Harriet Devine Jump offers a careful and detailed assessment of the View in her essay ‘“The Cool Eye of Observation”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution’. This essay offers an accurate and

which Wollstonecraft “[cjertainly [...] gave herself fiilly and frankly to sexual love” with Imlay, and quotes Godwin’s description of the transformation this love made on her life and character - “ [h]er sorrows, the depression o f her spirits, were forgotten, and she assumed all the simplicity and the vivacity of a youthful mind” etc. - without comment. In spite o f giving a very positive account of this book as a successful “Revolutionary

feminist” work, he imagines it written “[mjeanwhile” in the spaces of her relationship with Imlay, and closes his discussion by commenting that Wollstonecraft would have been “more concerned by the breakdown o f her vanguardist revolutionary conjugahty with Imlay than by the failure o f her vanguardist revolutionary writing” (p. 153, p. 150 & p.

152). Edna Nixon also characterises Wollstonecraft's “work” on the Historical and M oral View as secondary to her relationship with Imlay, claiming that “she could await Imlay's visits in peace of mind, passing the time between his visits in work upon her Historical and M oral View o f the French R e v o lu tio n ''A preoccupation with Wollstonecraft’s erotic life takes precedence in these accounts, which speculate about the effect on her writing o f the relationship with Imlay. None speculates about the effect of writing during her first pregnancy. Wollstonecraft herself highlighted in a letter to Everina that the H istorical and M oral View was “written during my pregnancy”.^* In this chapter I am interested in tracing a possible connection between what I find to be the most striking aspects of this work: the disembodiment and de-gendering of the narrative voice, the absence o f the decapitated king, and the writer’s first experience of maternity as physically and visibly embodied femininity.

careful charting of the context in which the View was written, and picks up on the criticism by the British Critic that the View is unable to reconcile Wollstonecraft’s aim to argue “first principles” and her emphasis on “what has passed under her observation”, and highlights the “despair” Wollstonecraft was experiencing in the face of events in Paris; see Kelvin Everest (ed.). Revolution in Writing, pp. 101-19 (p. 103 & p. 117).

Edna Nixon, Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Life and Times (London: Dent, 1971), p. 118.

4. A sight or prospect o f some landscape or extended scene;