Mary had previously published (1794) the first volume of _An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution_, and _Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark_. After her death Godwin published _Posthumous Works by the Author of A Vindication, etc._, comprising a horrible unfinished novel called _Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman_, her LETTERS TO IMLAY, and to her friend, Mr. Johnson, an incomplete tale called _The Cave of Fancy_, an _Essay on Poetry_, a series of _Lessons in Spelling and Reading_, and a few fragmentary _Hints_ on various subjects. Mary Wollstonecraft has a three-fold claim on our attention. She was “the first of the new genus” of professional literary women, in contradistinction to the old race of “blue-stockings.” She was the author of the VINDICATION, which, despite its faults, is “remarkable as the herald of the demand not even yet wholly conceded by all, that woman should be the equal and friend, not the slave and toy of man.” Lastly, as the writer of the heart-breaking LETTERS TO IMLAY, which, notwithstanding her own views, form, as Lowell has said of her life, “the most powerful argument possible against the doctrine of the ‘Elective Affinities’,”--Mary Wollstonecraft can never be forgotten. Our mosaic portrait is doubtless far from perfect; yet who shall paint her as she was, without distortion, without idealization? This beautiful woman, with her “Titianesque” coloring, her careless dress, and habits frugal that she might be generous--with her quick temper, sensitiveness, pride, inconsistency, deep personal tenderness; with her melancholy, and her misunderstood religious enthusiasm; this daughter of the Revolution, her strong head crowded with theories--some of them, one would think, to be beaten out of it by all the waves and billows that went over her. But not so; the circumstances of her marriage with Godwin, the tendency of the work done during the brief remainder of her life, show us that we must add tenacity to her characteristics. This creature, now coarse, now fine, now harsh, and now all pity,--who shall explore her strength and weakness, her deeps and shallows? It is natural that in an age better calculated to understand her motives than that in which she lived, a vindicator should have arisen to call up out of the past, by the name of Mary Wollstonecraft, a spirit radiant and purified, like the soul of Ianthe in ‘Queen Mab,’ from every stain of earthliness. But to make the woman herself live before us, as she lived in Paris, in London, in those strange days of the close of the eighteenth century--that would be a task for a pen that has dealt with character under somewhat similar conditions--the pen of Ivan Turgenef.