{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020016012810248198, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01120896717373899, 'mean_word_length': 5.983240223463687, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Translational Afterlife: French and German Rewritings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the Revolutionary Era

ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars have begun to examine how translations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works influenced the development of ideas about women’s rights in nineteenth-century Europe and beyond. This article focuses on two translations of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): the anonymous French translation, Défense des droits des femmes (1792), and Rettung der Rechte des Weibes (1793–94), a collaborative work by the German educationists Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn. I argue that Wollstonecraft’s feminist thought was reshaped by its passage into different national and cultural contexts. The translators develop strategies which partially reflect their different ideological contexts but also exceed easy categorization as either sympathetic or hostile to Wollstonecraft’s explicitly Revolutionary feminism. The article furnishes a case study for the role translation plays in transmitting different versions of Wollstonecraft’s texts to the diverse readerships of Western Europe and creating a complex translational afterlife for her feminism.