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Mary Wollstonecraft’s Translational Afterlife: French and German Rewritings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the Revolutionary Era

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Laura Kirkley

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Abstract

Recently, scholars have begun to examine how translations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works influenced the development of ideas about women’s rights in nineteenth-century Europe and beyond. This article focuses on two translations of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): the anonymous French translation, Défense des droits des femmes (1792), and Rettung der Rechte des Weibes (1793-4), a collaborative work by the German educationists Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn. I argue that Wollstonecraft’s feminist thought was reshaped by its passage into different national and cultural contexts. The translators develop strategies which partially reflect their different ideological contexts but also exceed easy categorisation as either sympathetic or hostile to Wollstonecraft’s explicitly Revolutionary feminism. The article furnishes a useful case study for the role translation plays in transmitting different versions of Wollstonecraft’s feminism to the diverse readerships of Western Europe, thereby granting her a complex translational afterlife.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Kirkley L

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: European Romantic Review

Year: 2022

Volume: 33

Issue: 1

Pages: 1-24

Online publication date: 27/01/2022

Acceptance date: 13/07/2020

Date deposited: 14/07/2020

ISSN (print): 1050-9585

ISSN (electronic): 1740-4657

Publisher: Taylor and Francis

URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2021.2019027

DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2021.2019027

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