My debts haunt me like Furies: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminism of her Personal Letters

By analysing Mary Wollstonecraft's personal letters to her friends, her siblings and her lover, this article finds new ways of exploring how property informs her ideas about freedom and independence, and of connecting her ideas to our present. Her personal letters allow us to start a new conversation with Wollstonecraft, and to rethink the intimate connections between ideas and lives which have been so contested in past interpretations of her political thought. Drawing on vulnerable feminist methods, the article focuses on three moments of disruption, ambivalence and failure, namely her experiences of losing her inheritance; of trying to extricate her sister from her marriage; and of being abandoned by her lover. In these moments, as well as in her experience of a life ‘involved with debts’, we can trace how property functioned as a system of power in Wollstonecraft's life and in the lives of those around her. By reading her very personal letters with compassion, the article opens up a dialogue about mental health, grief, care, indebtedness and dependence that enriches our present feminism and speaks very directly to current concerns. Wollstonecraft's letters offer a rich resource for exploring her political theory. Through close reading of the collected letters written between 1773 and 1797, this article argues for a novel understanding of Wollstonecraft's conceptions of freedom and independence, drawing on her ideas of composure and waywardness, and the notion of being settled. The preoccupations and concerns of her letters, the traumas and the vulnerabilities that they expose, forcefully illustrate the gendered-ness of property, and of freedom, both in her times and in ours. They contribute to the feminist project of expanding the meaning of politics, helping us to think about property, power and the homing desire in the space between the public and private.