In the Spring semester of 2025, the 2024-27 NEH Scholarly Editions editorial team of Eileen M. Hunt (Notre Dame, textual editor), Rachel Lentz (Notre Dame, editorial assistant), and Nancy E. Johnson (SUNY-New Paltz, volume editor) created this draft standard edition of Wollstonecraft's 1790 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Men (VRM), based on the scans of the Notre Dame Rare Book and Special Collections Library's copies of the 1st edition and the 2nd (author corrected) edition of VRM, and the OCR text files of VRM created from those scans. 

We have published this draft standard edition of VRM on this site as a digital humanities scholarly and teaching resource in an accessible, scrollable, searchable, and downloadable PDF format. At the back of this draft digital edition, you will find the endnotes that contain a comprehensive list of textual variants between the 1st and 2nd editions of VRM. This is the first time that there has been a comprehensive study and recording of the revisions that Wollstonecraft made to the VRM between its initial (anonymous) release in the 1st edn. by 25-27 November 1790 and its re-issuing in the author-revised 2nd edn. (with the author's name on the title page) by 14-16 December 1790. With endnotes, we have recorded 259 sentences in the 2nd edn. VRM that contain textual variants from the 1st edn. Please take a look at previous (and future!) blog posts on this site for discussion of some of the significant and substantive textual variants and their implications for Wollstonecraft's political, philosophical, and theological critique of Burke.

This is a first draft of our standard edition of VRM for Oxford University Press. Any citations from it should use the following language to give credit to the scholars who created it:

Please cite as draft of Eileen M. Hunt, ed., Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, forthcoming in Vol. 4 of Wollstonecraft’s Collected Works, editorial assistant Rachel Lentz, volume editor Nancy E. Johnson, and editor-in-chief Emma Clery (under contract, Oxford University Press, expected 2028).