The Legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft's Educational and Philosophical Storytelling

Abstract

In her works, Mary Wollstonecraft was greatly concerned with women’s education. Highlighting the importance of exemplary storytelling, she laid special emphasis on the importance of reading in young girls’ lifelong learning; she even co-edited a collection of texts specifically designed for female readers. In addition to her novels, political treatises and translations, she also wrote two pieces on education, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and an unfinished tale titled “The Cave of Fancy” (1787). I will discuss the unique features of her self-trained storytelling in general, while also exploring disturbing content imagined by a “fanciful” woman’s spirit in one particular tale. Mary Wollstonecraft’s fantastic tale not only provides a framework for the creative development of the female mind; it also includes several images that would later appear in Romantic philosophical narratives, as exemplified by Mary Shelley’s “The Fields of Fancy”.