In them Wollstonecraft growsįrom the awkward child of fourteen to the woman of thirty-eight facing herĭeath in childbirth. Moving in their self-centered vulnerability. They are occasionally funny, often engaging, but most frequently Off as the overflow sometimes of joy, more often of bitterness, ennui, and Wollstonecraft’s letters were self-aware certainly but they were also dashed and it might have been inserted in the bills of mortality – 'dead of letter writing A. She might have said with Amelia Opie, a friend from her final years, “If writing were an effort to me I should not now be alive. She wrote incessantly throughout her life, priding herself on her frank expression and often berating her correspondents for not rising to her expansive standards. Indeed Wollstonecraft's value is as much in letter writing as in public authorship often she seems almost to live through her correspondence, expressing within it her numerous roles: child, daughter, companion, friend, teacher, governess, sister, literary hack, woman of letters, lover, wife, rationalist, and romantic. After Wollstonecrafts death, Godwin published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for a century. Her works from her juvenile productions as a young girl in the Yorkshire town of Beverley to her final notes to her husband and future biographer William Godwin are instantly recognizable. Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century.
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