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The essays in this collection offer readers vivid and varied evidence of the female response to recurring attempts by culture to artificially limit identity along the gendered lines of private and public experience. Calling on voices both familiar and little-known, British and American, black and white, young and old, poor and rich, heterosexual and lesbian, the essayists explore how women within unique personal and historical conditions used life-writing as a means of both self-understanding and connection to a community of sympathetic others, real or imagined. The life-writings within this anthology span the modern history of the genre itself, with writers drawn from as early as the seventeenth century and as late as the 1990s.

This seven-volume collection brings together the known works of Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century philosopher, writer and women’s rights advocate. Condemned by her contemporaries for her unconventional lifestyle, Wollstonecraft was later recognised as a founding figure of the feminist movement. She was also an acute observer of the political upheavals of the French revolution and advocated educational reform. Wollstonecraft’s writings, which include A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, are recognised as cornerstone texts in the development of feminist thought. This book is therefore a vital reference to the student of feminist history, and will also be of value to any reader interested in the origins of feminism.