One might reasonably begin by asking whether we need another biographically inflected study of Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft's life has been the subject of intensive treatment at recognizably high moments of feminism, a fact which itself deserves more investigation than it has received thus far. The 1890s, the 1970s, when six biographies were published in as many years, and the twenty-first century, which has seen no fewer than seven biographies (broadly understood) in the wake of Janet Todd's authoritative Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (Columbia University Press, 2000), are all moments characterized by heightened interest in Wollstonecraft's life. Cora Kaplan has remarked that Wollstonecraft has been “over-biographied.” Musing on the cluster of biographies of Wollstonecraft produced during feminism's second wave, Kaplan concludes that “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” (“Mary Wollstonecraft's Reception and Legacies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson [Cambridge University Press, 2002], 253).

Sylvana Tomaselli's Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics enters this established field with a welcome mission. Tomaselli is an intellectual historian, and has published widely on the question of women and enlightenment thought, so it not surprising to learn that her interest here is not to rehearse yet again the details of Wollstonecraft's personal struggles and suffering, or the seeming contradictions between her writing and her life, all of which is well-trod ground in the history of Wollstonecraft's reception. Choosing instead to follow “a format Wollstonecraft herself adopted in her first published work,” Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787), by “bringing together [Wollstonecraft's] reflections on a number of subjects under eponymous headings” (10), Tomaselli signals that hers is a different kind of book about Wollstonecraft. Her study is divided into chapters with titles such as “What She Liked and Loved” and “What She Wished and Wanted.” For the reader with even a passing acquaintance with the details of Wollstonecraft's at times difficult life, these chapter headings will offer a palpable sense of relief because Tomaselli brings a fresh, controversy-free perspective to the life and, more specifically, the thought of a well-known but still little-understood woman. Part of Tomaselli's aim is to integrate Wollstonecraft the intellectual and thinker with Wollstonecraft the critic and reviewer, a facet of her early career that has been given less attention by scholars and where Tomaselli turns her attention in the book's early chapters. Some of this is ground covered by Barbara Taylor in her 2003 study Mary Wollstonecraft and The Feminist Imagination, which similarly sets Wollstonecraft into her intellectual milieu. A key difference is that Taylor takes as a given Wollstonecraft's feminism, whereas Tomaselli remarks near the end of her book that Wollstonecraft tends to “defy categorization.” Indeed, she adds, “[h]ow could it be otherwise when she wrote perceptively about so many subjects from the inner self, sexuality, the soul, and divinity to the unity of the human species, and lived in and responded to a rapidly changing political landscape?” (209).

Tomaselli resists the urge to claim Wollstonecraft for a particular politics, whether radical, liberal, or republican, to name only a few that get attached to Wollstonecraft's name. The vast majority of books on Wollstonecraft are in the main unable to resist such an urge, and, in a similar vein, Tomaselli resists painting Wollstonecraft's affective and emotional life with the broad brush most commentators use. Avoiding entirely the dramas of Wollstonecraft's sad and painful childhood and subsequently tumultuous romantic life, Tomaselli focuses instead on where Wollstonecraft drew passion and inspiration: from music, poetry, theater, and, of course, reading and writing.

Among the strengths of Tomaselli's study, in addition to her focus on Wollstonecraft's work as a critic for the Analytical Review, is her keen insight into Wollstonecraft's understanding of the progress of human history and civilization, which is not surprising given Tomaselli's extensive writing on women and enlightenment historiography. A chapter entitled “What Went Wrong? The World as it Was” unfolds an elegant and clarifying discussion of Wollstonecraft's response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, emphasizing in particular the effectiveness of Wollstonecraft's canny rhetorical moves. And in “What She Wished and Wanted,” Tomaselli writes that Wollstonecraft was aware of “her double identity as ameliorator and transformer,” of writing, that is, both for an imperfect present and the imagination of a better future (166). Wollstonecraft was skilled at writing in different voices, different tenses, all with the aim of calling different futures into being.

Some readers might find Tomaselli's impulse not to place Wollstonecraft more firmly within a political context too quietist for a thinker as passionately committed to a better world as Wollstonecraft was. Others might find it refreshing that Tomaselli gives Wollstonecraft room to breathe on her own terms, without the inevitable distortions of historiography, or the imposition of our present on her past. Either way, Tomaselli's book takes its place alongside other significant studies of Wollstonecraft: just when we might have begun to feel like there is nothing new to say about Wollstonecraft, Tomaselli shows us that there is.