Jeanne Moskal, "The Death of the Author and the Birth of the Reader in Wollstonecraft's Life-Writing"

¹ Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1968), reprinted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, general editor Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 1470.
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² The standard edition of Wollstonecraft's works is The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989). Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman is here cited from the more widely available edition by Moira Ferguson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). Important critical works on this novel include Laurie Langbauer, "An Early Romance: Motherhood and Women's Writing in Mary Wollstonecraft's Novels," in Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 208-219; Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (New York: Longman, 1989), 38-42; Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: St. Martin's, 1996), 196-228; Glynis Ridley, "Injustice in the Works of Godwin and Wollstonecraft," in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, edited by Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 69-88; and S. Leigh Matthews, "(Un)Confinements: The Madness of Motherhood in Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman," in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, edited by Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 85-98.
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³ See Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971); and Catherine Belsey, "Constructing the Subject, Deconstructing the Text" (1985), reprinted in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robin R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (rev. ed.; New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 657-673. The quotation is from Belsey.
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⁴ William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,' edited by Richard Holmes with Wollstonecraft's A Short Residence in Sweden (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 249; Robert Southey, letter to Joseph Cottle, quoted in Holmes's introduction, 17.
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⁵ See especially Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory" (1970), reprinted in Leitch, ed. (cited above, n. 1), 1550-1564. The editors' headnote to Jauss is helpfully lucid.
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⁶ See Jean Le Drew Metcalfe, The Mother's Legacy to her Vnborn Childe by Elizabeth Joscelin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Sylvia Brown, editor, Women's Writing in Stuart England: The Mothers' Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin, and Elizabeth Richardson (Guilford, Surrey: Sutton Press, 1999); and Sophia Blaydes, "Anne Murray Halkett," in An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, edited by Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter (New York: Garland Press, 1988), s.v. "Halkett." The quotation from Brown appears on v.
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⁷ Elizabeth Joscelin, manuscript version of The Mothers Legacie, to her Vnborne Childe in Brown, ed., 106.
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⁸ Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, in Ferguson, ed. (cited above, n. 2), 23.
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⁹ Ibid., 74.
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¹⁰ Ibid., 31.
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¹¹ For mentions of gift-giving, see the prefaces by Robert Lee and Sarah Josepha Hale, reprinted in Metcalfe, 119 and 128. For the signature evidence, see Metcalfe, 12. For discussion of the nineteenth-century editions of Joscelin, including sectarian controversies motivating them, see Sylvia Brown, "The Approbation of Elizabeth Joscelin," English Manuscript Studies 10 (2000), forthcoming. I am grateful to Professor Brown for sharing her work with me in typescript.
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¹² The author thanks Doucet Devin Fischer, Megan Matchinske, and Gina Luria Walker for their suggestions and comments on this essay.
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