![]() ![]() ![]() (A quarter millennium later, philosopher Martha Nussbaum would come to write brilliantly about the imperfect union of the two.) Wollstonecraft saw the imagination as the gateway to liberation, the most vitalizing nectar for the mind, and the most seductive aphrodisiac she saw love as the domain in which “the imagination mingles its bewitching colouring” - for better or for worse, to enchant into rapture as well as to delude into despair. “Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue,” philosopher and political theorist Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759–September 10, 1797) wrote in her 1792 proto-feminist masterwork A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.” Independence became the animating force of Wollstonecraft’s life, and there was no form of it she valued more highly than the independence of the imagination - something her second daughter, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, would come to inherit. ![]()
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