Never did any author enter into a cause, with a more ardent desire to be found, not a flourishing and empty declaimer, but an effectual champion.  She considered herself as standing forth in defence of one half of the human species, labouring under a yoke which, through all the records of time, had degraded them from the station of rational beings, and almost sunk them to the level of the brutes.  She saw indeed, that they were often attempted to be held in silken fetters, and bribed into the love of slavery; but the disguise and the treachery served only the more fully to confirm her opposition.  She regarded her sex, in the language of Calista, as

    “In every state of life the slaves of men:” 

the rich as alternately under the despotism of a father, a brother, and a husband; and the middling and the poorer classes shut out from the acquisition of bread with independence, when they are not shut out from the very means of an industrious subsistence.  Such were the views she entertained of the subject; and such the feelings with which she warmed her mind.

The work is certainly a very bold and original production.  The strength and firmness with which the author repels the opinions of Rousseau, Dr. Gregory, and Dr. James Fordyce, respecting the condition of women, cannot but make a strong impression upon every ingenuous reader.  The public at large formed very different opinions respecting the character of the performance.  Many of the sentiments are undoubtedly of a rather masculine description.  The spirited and decisive way in which the author explodes the system of gallantry, and the species of homage with which the sex is usually treated, shocked the majority.  Novelty produced a sentiment in their mind, which they mistook for a sense of injustice.  The pretty, soft creatures that are so often to be found in the female sex, and that class of men who believe they could not exist without such pretty, soft creatures to resort to, were in arms against the author of so heretical and blasphemous a doctrine.  There are also, it must be confessed, occasional passages of a stern and rugged feature, incompatible with the true stamina of the writer’s character.  But, if they did not belong to her fixed and permanent character, they belonged to her character pro tempore; and what she thought, she scorned to qualify.

Yet, along with this rigid, and somewhat amazonian temper, which characterised some parts of the book, it is impossible not to remark a luxuriance of imagination, and a trembling delicacy of sentiment, which would have done honour to a poet, bursting with all the visions of an Armida and a Dido.

The contradiction, to the public apprehension, was equally great, as to the person of the author, as it was when they considered the temper of the book.  In the champion of her sex, who was described as endeavouring to invest them with all the rights of man, those whom curiosity prompted to seek the occasion of beholding her, expected to find a sturdy, muscular, raw-boned virago; and they were not a little surprised, when, instead of all this, they found a woman, lovely in her person, and, in the best and most engaging sense, feminine in her manners.