Brief Biography

Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) sparked many responses. Wollstonecraft responded with A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Men, and William Godwin published his Enquiry into Political Justice partly in response to Burke. Burke's negative reaction to the French Revolution surprised many of his contemporaries as he had been a staunch supporter of the American Revolution. According to David Lee Clark, Burke used Locke's idea that "government existed solely for the good of the people" to argue that "whatever is, is right" (6).

Chronology entries on Burke

Literary Works by Burke (Liberty Fund)

Additional Biographical Information (Bluepete)

Relevant Bibliography Entries

• Kelly, Gary. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York (NY): St. Martin's, 1992.
• Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
• De Bruyn, Franz. The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
• Furniss, Tom. Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Cox, Jeffrey. "Ideology and Genre in the British Antirevolutionary Drama of the 1790s." ELH 58 (1991), 579-610.