Virago, libertine, prude, radical, egalitarian, bourgeois, mother of feminist theory - since Mary Wollstonecraft's death in 1797 there has been no shortage of epithets for her. Her passionate, intellectual life and too-early death have been mythologized since William Godwin published a memoir of his wife in 1798, and in recent years biographical treatments have been plentiful. Barbara Taylor's Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, while interested in the questions that Wollstonecraft's life and afterlives provoke, demands that we engage seriously the terms of her thought in their historical context. Taylor convincingly argues that Wollstonecraft's work is neither fully assimilable to contemporary feminist theories nor fully describable in the terms of the radical British Enlightenment thought of her late eighteenth century peers, but nonetheless illuminates the structuring complexities of feminist political thought in both her moment and ours.

Taylor's most striking contribution to Wollstonecraft scholarship in this book is signaled by her title: her emphasis on the "feminist imagination," she writes, comes in part from the significance of the imagination as a category in late eighteenth century political thought and in part from the word's "dual reference to conscious, reasoned creativity … and to the implicit, often unconscious fantasies and wishes that underlie intellectual innovation" (4). The serious power ascribed to the imagination in the late eighteenth century licenses Taylor to consider aspects of Wollstonecraft's work, her religion and her fiction writing especially, usually passed over quickly in discussions of her politics. While Taylor acknowledges Wollstonecraft's commitment to reason as a primary political good, her examination of Wollstonecraft's imaginative work, with its interest in questions of sentiment, faith and erotic desire, allows for a productive complication of those accounts of Wollstonecraft that see her as a kind of female Thomas Paine, advocating the recognition of women in a natural rights framework. Taylor does show that this strain is significant in Wollstonecraft's thought, but argues that her concern with fantasy and desire as shaping forces in human life -a concern Taylor draws out most thoroughly in her discussion of Wollstonecraft's relationship to Rousseau's thought-is inextricably intertwined with her 1790s revolutionary rationalism.

Taylor's chapter on the role of religion in shaping Wollstonecraft's thought, and its significant place in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) especially, is a much-needed supplement not only to Wollstonecraft scholarship but to recent accounts of late eighteenth-century English radicalism more generally. Although as Taylor shows, Wollstonecraft's relationship to institutionalized religious practice changed throughout her life, from her intellectual engagement with Rational Dissent to the Romantic celebration of nature that marks her later writing, Wollstonecraft's sense of the divine as a measure of what is possible both personally and politically runs powerfully through her thought. Wollstonecraft, Taylor argues, "sought in the divine … a revolutionized ethical subjectivity" (129). The Vindication takes a loving identification with God as a possible source for full female subjecthood. Taylor's careful reading of the religious thread in Wollstonecraft's work, and its close connection to her concern with erotic desire, transforms the oft-repeated picture of Wollstonecraft as a puritanical rationalist. Taylor locates Wollstonecraft's concern with the place of desire in an ethical life not only in the context of her ambivalent, contentious relationship with Rousseau's work, but in the broader culture of sensibility that flourished in late eighteenth century Britain. Like Paine and Godwin, Wollstonecraft saw 'manly virtue' as the necessary foundation for a social order built in the wake of the Revolution; but Taylor argues that unlike her peers, she was acutely aware of the difficulty of such virtue as a model for those 'human creatures' whose very being is "saturated by masculine fantasy" (129). Religion offered Wollstonecraft no easy answers to this problem, but we cannot grasp what she hoped for women, Taylor suggests, without understanding how conceptions of the divine helped shape her thought.

The importance to Taylor's argument of contemporary psychoanalytic accounts of the role of desire in subject-formation is visible in her emphasis on fantasy in Wollstonecraft's work, but such theoretical concerns do not come at the expense of a careful, historically rigorous reading. Throughout the book, Taylor takes issue with arguments that see Wollstonecraft within an emergent 'bourgeois individualism' (Taylor's critique of the applicability of such a paradigm to 1790s London radical circles is stringent) or as a late moment in British classical republicanism. One of the great strengths of the book is its placing of Wollstonecraft alongside other female political thinkers of the period: the famous group of 'bluestockings' that included Catherine Macaulay and Anna Letitia Barbauld, the Jacobin novelists such as Mary Hays who were closely connected to Godwin, and even women like Mary Robinson who were significant presences in aristocratic Whig circles. Wollstonecraft is often seen as a singular creature, and indeed she tended to deny her own connections to the other radical women of her day, but Taylor carefully shows her indebtedness to other thinkers alongside her innovations. Taylor reads Wollstonecraft's posthumous, unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), as an impassioned meditation on the problem of forming feminist alliances, especially across class divides, and finds in its depiction of such ties as "fragile, bias-ridden, courageous" a gesture toward what "were to become the driving forces of a mass feminist politics" (244). Taylor is happy to leave us with a Wollstonecraft who cannot be reconciled to any of the descriptors with which I began this essay. Wollstonecraft emerges rather as a woman whose strengths lie not only in her clear-headed account of the role of education in "unfitting" women for political life, but also in her contradictions, her passions, and above all her ability to show the multiplicity of forces running through the problem of women's social, political and economic equality in the optimistic days after the French revolution, forces that run through that problem still.

Hilary Strang, The University of Chicago

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