Routledge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft: Wollstonecraft at Work
deadline for submissions:
January 15, 2026
full name / name of organization:
Cynthia Richards and Shawn Lisa Maurer
contact email:
crichards@wittenberg.edu
source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/06/27/routledge-companion-to-mary-wollstonecraft-wollstonecraft-at-work
Routledge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft: Wollstonecraft at Work
Call for Papers
Mary Wollstonecraft’s contributions as a philosopher are uncontested, her reputation cemented by such recent publications as The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019), the first collection on a woman philosopher to appear in the Routledge Philosophical Minds series. By contrast, her work as a writer remains unsettled. We know her work to be passionate: angry with Edmund Burke, she composed the Vindication of the Rights of Man in six weeks. She writes Letters Written During a Short Residence to an indifferent lover, the American businessman Gilbert Imlay, and through her romantically charged descriptions, wins the reluctant affections of the Enlightenment philosopher William Godwin instead. As this example makes manifest, if Wollstonecraft succeeds as a writer, it seemingly happens by accident, a byproduct of the fervor of her convictions. We grant her a place in the literary canon because her influence is undeniable and not because the quality of her production is uniform and unassailable.
This Routledge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft will challenge this reading by focusing on Wollstonecraft as a writer at work, a writer consciously and deliberately innovating to produce a rich and varied oeuvre that reveals forms of intellectual and professional labor beyond her better-known philosophical treatises and novels. Instead, this volume will make the case for Wollstonecraft as an artist first and a polemicist second, yet an artist whose creative interventions stayed true to her principles in the face of conservative backlash. In this regard, the volume comes closest to emulating The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (2002) while building upon the more multidisciplinary Mary Wollstonecraft in Context (Cambridge 2020).
Yet even as the volume will argue for the intrinsic quality of her writing, it will also recognize that the work remains incomplete. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) had a planned second volume that was never realized; The Wrongs of Woman (1798) was published unfinished. Her primer to her young daughter, Fanny, has yet to be published as a stand-alone text. But her work also remains incomplete because it continues to exert such a powerful force more than two hundred years after her death. Although the feminist political implications of her work, which continues to be “constantly re-moulded in feminism’s changing image,” as Barbara Taylor writes, have been traced in multiple ways, the impact of her literary production and readers’ engagement with that multifaceted work, in the academy, in popular culture, and in the classroom, has yet to be fully explored.
We envision essays relating to three broad categories–Wollstonecraft at Work, Wollstonecraft in the World, and Wollstonecraft in the Classroom–and invite essays on all stages of Wollstonecraft’s career and all genres in which she worked. Possible topics might include Wollstonecraft as a working woman/professional writer/public intellectual; Wollstonecraft as an artistic innovator; Wollstonecraft’s growth and development; Wollstonecraft and visual culture; Wollstonecraft as an educator. We also seek essays that address Wollstonecraft’s historical as well as contemporary resonances in literary, artistic, and feminist political contexts across the globe. We encourage reflections on the productive imbrications of Wollstonecraft’s life and work; on her critical reception, her artistic legacies, and her place in popular culture. Finally, we invite essays on editing and teaching Wollstonecraft’s work. How is her influence felt throughout the world and how is her work taught in various regions and countries? How does she continue to educate us and our students?
We welcome preliminary proposals on these or related topics. Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words to both editors via email by January 15, 2026.
Shawn Lisa Maurer (College of the Holy Cross): smaurer@holycross.edu
Cynthia Richards (Wittenberg University): crichards@wittenberg.edu
Last updated July 3, 2025
