Who Read Wollstonecraft?

Eileen Hunt Bottin, University of Notre Dame, is publishing Wollstonecraft in Europe: A Revisionist Reception History, 1792-1904 in the History of European Ideas (forthcoming). Here is the abstract. 

It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin’s 'Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century — drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sources, and Wollstonecraft scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present — this article applies a revised Rezeptionsgeschichte approach to tracing her intellectual influence on the woman question and organized feminism in Europe. Although the 'Memoirs' and post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove underground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe, like the United States, was more positive and sustained in comparison to the public backlash she faced as a 'fallen woman' in her homeland of Britain through the bulk of the Victorian era.

The full text is not available from SSRN.