In my essay I pursue the line of inquiry which has recently been proposed by scholars who have reconstructed the historical context of Wollstonecraft’s feminism to bring into sharper focus what can be seen as consistent motives of her thought. Starting out from the thesis of Barbara Taylor that Wollstonecraft’s feminism was deeply rooted in the egalitarian theology of Radical Protestantism (Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination Cambridge University Press, 2003) I will argue that her brief career shows how, in her analysis of the hierarchy of the cognitive faculties, first she redefined reason by ascribing to it the power of intuitive apprehension, and eventually she replaced reason with imagination as the distinctive attribute of the human mind. Positioning herself—through Price’s theology and moral philosophy—in the Platonic and pagan as well as Christian Neo-Platonic traditions, she arrived several years before Wordsworth or Coleridge not only at an intuition of the creativity of human thinking but at a definition of the imagination as the supreme mental faculty. As a result, in some emotionally highly charged passages of her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), she constructed her own version of early Romanticism in England. These passages can be read side by side with passages of epiphany in Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude as the most powerful examples of the imagination leading through an investment in the quotidian to an apprehension of immortality.

在我的文章中，我追寻了学者们最近提出的调查路线，他们重建了沃斯通克拉夫特女权主义的历史背景，以更加清晰地关注她思想的一贯动机。从芭芭拉·泰勒的论文出发，沃斯通克拉夫特的女权主义深深植根于激进新教的平等神学（芭芭拉·泰勒、玛丽·沃斯通克拉夫特和女权主义想象）剑桥大学出版社，2003）我认为，她短暂的职业生涯表明，在她对认知能力层次结构的分析中，她首先通过赋予直觉理解的力量来重新定义理性，最终她用想象力取代了理性作为人类心灵的独特属性。通过普赖斯的神学和道德哲学，她将自己定位在柏拉图和异教以及基督教新柏拉图传统中，她比华兹华斯或柯勒律治早了几年，不仅对人类思维的创造力有了直觉，而且对想象力有了定义。作为最高的精神能力。因此，她在瑞典、挪威和丹麦短暂居住期间写的信中，有一些情绪激动的段落（1796），她在英国构建了她自己的早期浪漫主义版本。这些段落可以与华兹华斯 1805 年《前奏曲》中的顿悟段落并排阅读，作为想象力通过对日常生活的投资导致对不朽的理解的最有力的例子。