New Releases by Mary Wollstonecraft

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters to The Female Reader, a selection of texts for girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism—and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition. It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft’s great work came out of an earlier and much shorter vindication—A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Editions in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft’s “other vindication.” It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index.

The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley reveal a remarkable woman living in a remarkable age. They date from October 1814 - shortly after her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley - through September 1850, five months before her death. Her correspondents'' names are familiar - Shelley himself, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, General Lafayette, Sir Walter Scott - and the letters abound with anecdotes about such eminent figures as her parents (William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft), Keats, Washington Irving, and Charles and Mary Lamb. Publication of the widely acclaimed three-volume edition of Mary Shelley''s letters was completed in 1988, containing all 1,276 of her known extant letters. Now Betty T. Bennett has selected 230 of those letters to give an overview of Mary Shelley''s life as she was seeing it, living it, and recording it. Bennett also includes an introductory essay that sketches a portrait of Mary Shelley, her world, and her place in the history of literature and letters.

The definitive, annotated edition of Mary Shelley''s classic novel.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) The first great manifesto of women’s rights, published in 1792 and an immediate best seller, made its author the toast of radical circles and the target of reactionary ones. Writing just after the French and American revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft firmly established the demand for women’s emancipation in the context of the ever-widening urge for human rights and individual freedom that surrounded those two great upheavals. She thereby opened the richest, most productive vein in feminist thought, and her success can be judged by the fact that her once radical polemic, through the efforts of the innumerable writers and activities she influenced, has become the accepted wisdom of the modern era. Challenging the prevailing culture that trained women to be nothing more than docile, decorative wives and mothers, Wollstonecraft was an ardent advocate of equal education and the full development of women’s rational capacities. Having supported herself independently as a governess and teacher before finding success as a writer, and having conducted unconventional relationships with men, Wollstonecraft faced severe criticism both for her life choices and for her ideas. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she dared to ask a question whose urgency is undiminished in our time: how can women be both female and free?

"James Rieger''s Frankenstein is relatively special among editions: it is the definitive scholarly text, and it is also the most readable copy for the classroom and the general reader. . . .The Rieger Frankenstein is very simply the best edition of this tremendously important and popular novel."--William Veeder, University of Chicago

Frankenstein was published in 1818, the work of a 21-year-old genius named Mary Shelley. Hundreds of movies, adaptations, and monster masks later, its reputation remains so lively that the title has become its own word in the English language. Victor Frankenstein, a scientist, discovers the secret of reanimating the dead. After he rejects his hideous creation, not even the farthest poles of the earth will keep his bitter monster from seeking an inhuman revenge. Inspired by a uniquely Romantic view of science’s possibilities, Shelley’s masterpiece ultimately wrestles with the hidden shadows of the human mind.