A rather nice copy of the attractive first Scott Library edition of Wollstonecraft’s important proto-feminist philosophical polemic, the first edition to feature a Prefatory Note by her C19th biographer, Elizabeth Robins Pennell.
An extraordinary woman in her own right, Pennell (1855-1936) was “an adventurous, accomplished, self-assured, well-known [Anglo-American] columnist, biographer, cookbook collector and art critic” as well as a pioneer cycle tourist (who followed Chaucer’s and Sterne’s routes by bike). Based for much of her adult life in Britain, her important cookery book collection is held by the Library of Congress.