Mary Wollstonecraft’s cottage economics: property, political economy, and the European future

This paper discusses the figure of the cottage throughout Wollstonecraft’s writings in the context of her ongoing critique of political economy. It explores links between Wollstonecraft and agrarian economic alternatives proposed by her radical contemporaries. Whilst the cottage is a well-recognised trope in the late eighteenth-century picturesque, this paper argues that Wollstonecraft’s cottages need to be seen in a distinct light: as embodying a critique of a particular form of economic modernity and as measuring the possibility of an alternative economic future for Europe.