Wollstonecraft: Independent Woman

Alan Coffee approaches Mary Wollstonecraft’s works with the aim of showing their philosophical value. Wollstonecraft wrote in a wide variety of genres, none of which is easily identified as philosophical argumentation. Like any scholar working to extract the philosophical contents of Wollstonecraft’s texts, Coffee therefore sets out with a philosophical toolbox, which “entails identifying or reconstructing underlying principles, examining their implications, testing basic arguments and clarifying key concepts” (7). We can compare Coffee’s book with two other recent books on Wollstonecraft’s philosophical, political and religious thought. Whereas Emily Dumler-Winkler (2022) focuses on Wollstonecraft’s theology and philosophy of religion, developing an excellent study showing its relevance for contemporary discussions in these fields, and Sylvana Tomaselli (2021) collects pertinent essayistic reflections on a wide variety of topics discussed by Wollstonecraft, Coffee is distinctive in providing a synthesis of Wollstonecraft’s thought as a whole. His book is written with the double aim of being an accessible textbook and an original scholarly contribution.

Coffee’s interpretation is based on his reading of Wollstonecraft’s republican (or neo-Roman) concept of freedom as independence from the arbitrary power of others. This line of interpretation was first developed by Lena Halldenius (e.g., 2007; 2015; 2020; 2026) and has been deeply influential, not only on interpretations of Wollstonecraft’s political philosophy, but due to its emphasis on non-arbitrary reason, also on scholarship examining her moral philosophy and philosophy of mind (e.g., Reuter, 2017; 2022). Coffee develops his most novel contribution to our understanding of Wollstonecraft’s concept of freedom by consistently reading her biography as an expression of her striving for independence. Instead of using her eventful life to explain her philosophy, an inevitably murky strategy, he takes the opposite…