The critical reception of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1970s Britain and America was almost entirely mediated through biography. Between 1970 and 1976 alone, as Janet Todd noted over forty years ago, six biographies of Wollstonecraft were published in just six years: Margaret George’s One Woman’s “Situation”: A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft (1970); Edna Nixon’s Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Life and Times (1971); Eleanor Flexner’s Mary Wollstonecraft (1972); Emily Sunstein’s A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1975); Claire Tomalin’s The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974); and Margaret Tims’ Mary Wollstonecraft: A Social Pioneer (1976).1 Such an extraordinary number of biographies were produced in such quick succession that, as Cora Kaplan remarks, “we might cynically see some of them as responding at least as much to a publishing opportunity as to a cause.” For Kaplan, “something remains disturbingly hidden in this sudden excess of biography, as if Wollstonecraft’s life must be repeated again and again, more like a symptom that conceals a fear, a symptom that must be expressed but not named.”2 The inextricable connection between Wollstonecraft’s life narrative and her life’s work has a long history. The conflation of her life with her most famous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, can be traced, for instance, to the 1798 publication of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the very title of which substituted Wollstonecraft’s most famous book for the woman herself. Biographies of Wollstonecraft have also tended to appear at high moments of feminist struggle, a seemingly self-evident fact that bears more investigation than it has received thus far. Almost a century after Godwin’s Memoirs – a century, moreover, during which Wollstonecraft’s name was anathema – the 1880s and 1890s saw a new biography by Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and a new edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by the prominent suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, coinciding with the height of the women’s suffrage movement. Similarly, the 1970s rage for biographies of Wollstonecraft peaked with second-wave feminism, and laid the groundwork for the major works of feminist criticism about Wollstonecraft produced in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), Joan Landes’ Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (1988), Virginia Sapiro’s A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992), and Claudia Johnson’s Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995), among others.