Eileen Hunt

In 2016, The New York Public Library (NYPL) acquired four manuscript pages of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that appeared to be in her hand. This article provides the first annotated transcription, comparative handwriting analysis, and historical contextualization to empirically demonstrate that these are in fact holograph manuscript pages, drafted by Wollstonecraft for the end of Section 3, the entirety of Section 4, and part of Section 5 of the concluding chapter (XIII) of the Rights of Woman. These are the only known extant manuscript pages of the Rights of Woman, her most influential work worldwide, or any of her published books. Beyond her manuscript letters held mainly at the Bodleian Library and NYPL, there are only two other known manuscripts of her shorter published essays, both held in NYPL’s Mary Wollstonecraft Manuscript Material. NYPL’s newly acquired manuscript pages provide insights into Wollstonecraft’s composition and editing process for the Rights of Woman, and more firmly situate the timing of her final edits to the first edition in late December 1791 to early January 1792.

This author-meets-critics book symposium engages with Eileen M. Hunt’s concluding book in her trilogy on Mary Shelley and political philosophy, The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (2024). It brings together some of the leading scholars of apocalyptic political thought (Nomi Lazar, Alison McQueen, Ben Jones) alongside philosophers and political theorists (David Gunkel, Samuel Piccolo, Eileen Hunt) concerned with the question of the ethical relationship between human artifice and the plagues, real and metaphorical, that beset humanity and the world at large.

In this chapter, Eileen M. Hunt reveals new intellectual ties between Bentham and Benthamite thought and the political ideals of Wollstonecraft and Shelley, who theorized the relationship between women’s misery and women’s rights in British international thought from the end of the eighteenth century through the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Hunt argues that Wollstonecraft’s political ideas influenced her daughter Mary Shelley, leading her to develop a critique of Malthusian and Benthamite views on misery and population control that inscribed new political and feminist arguments into the global reception of British international thought.