The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the founding text of modern feminism. Then she fell in love with a man who did not deserve her, and the letters she wrote to him are among the most painfully honest documents in the English language. These seventy-seven letters, written between 1793 and 1795, cover the birth of her daughter Fanny, two suicide attempts, a solo journey through Scandinavia on her lover's business, and the slow disintegration of a relationship that the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could not bring herself to leave. They were published by her second husband, William Godwin, the year after her death, and they destroyed her reputation for a century. Read now, the letters are not a contradiction of Wollstonecraft's feminism. They are its most intimate illustration. She understood exactly what was happening to her. She could analyze the power dynamics, the emotional manipulation, the economic dependence. She could not escape them. A Raven's Gate Classics edition.