After two years, she returned home to care for her mother, whose health was declining. Tired of living under her father's tyranny, the 19-year-old Wollstonecraft disobeyed her parents by taking a job as a paid companion to a wealthy widow in Bath, a resort town that was a popular destination for England's newly moneyed classes. She also supplemented her rudimentary education by reading extensively from religious, historical, and philosophical books she managed to buy or borrow, and kept up with current events through newspapers and journals.
During this period of her life, Wollstonecraft met Frances (Fanny) Blood, who would become her closest friend. After the Walkington farm failed, the Wollstonecrafts lived in Hoxton once again, and then spent a year in Wales before moving back to London. The idea was to prepare adolescent girls for their future roles as wives, mothers, and proper middle-class ladies. She was sent to a local country school for girls, where the courses were skewed toward housekeeping arts like sewing and gardening.
This would be the longest time that Wollstonecraft ever lived in one place in her life. The Wollstonecrafts lived in Yorkshire from 1768 to 1774, on a farm called Walkington in the Wolds. The pressures led Wollstonecraft's father into alcoholism, and the related abuse he inflicted upon his wife, Elizabeth, had a profound impact on their daughter and her attitudes toward marriage. Because of this, the family moved several times when Wollstonecraft was a child, and kept growing in size despite their economic hardships. He attempted to establish himself as a gentleman farmer, but nearly all of his ventures failed. Her grandfather had made a fortune as a master weaver in London and through profitable real estate investments as well, but Wollstonecraft's father, Edward, squandered much of that inheritance. Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in Hoxton, near London, England, as the second of seven children in the family. She died several days after giving birth to her daughter, the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Her achievements and renown, however, could not save her from the most dangerous of all social ills for women in her day-that of childbirth and its attendant medical risks. The book is considered the first written document of the modern feminist movement, and in it Wollstonecraft argued in favor of full legal, social, and economic rights for women. English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) and her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, both achieved immense notoriety in Georgian England of the 1790s.
0 kommentar(er)
