Mary Wollstonecraft as Historian in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution ; and the Effect it has Produced in Europe (1794)

摘要

Mary Wollstonecraft’s An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), while a work of compilation, is also, as the Monthly Review stated, a book which she wrote « not like an annalist, but like a philosopher ». This article argues that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in Mary Wollstonecraft’s representation of the early events of the French Revolution, and that those are due to her reliance on two broadly incompatible models – the Scottish Enlighteners’ account of historical development, and the paradigm of sensibility inflected by fantastic gothic characterisation ; the depiction of a perverted sensibility in France’s social élites recasts political and economic problems as psychological and moral ones.