Article: ‘We advise her to throw aside her pen’

In the late eighteenth century, the literary marketplace expanded significantly and review culture burgeoned. Mary Wollstonecraft, often perceived as an avant-garde feminist, embarked on a ‘new plan of life’ as a paid, professional reviewer for Joseph Johnson’s and Thomas Christie’s Analytical Review. This article uses Wollstonecraft’s reviews to analyse Wollstonecraft’s reviewer persona and seeks to reveal the value in studying the language of Wollstonecraft’s reviews, illuminating the richness of her language as she negotiates fashioning herself as an authoritative figure while providing, often strongly held and strongly articulated, literary and wider sociopolitical criticism. She employs specific tropes, such as that of parenthood rather than motherhood, and methods, often comparing writers against one another in her reviews, to challenge expectations of women, of writing and of culture and to convey her own standards. However, it is these standards which reveal Wollstonecraft to opine views with classist and hierarchical echoes in reviews of established, popular and neophyte writers alike. Thus, by different means, hierarchies of literary ability come to the fore in Wollstonecraft’s reviews and, as the reviewer but also a writer, Wollstonecraft ensures she stands supreme. Yet, as this essay concludes, she does so in her endeavour to guide readers in whose hands rested future literary, sociopolitical and cultural values. Continue reading →