There is a clear line of descent from Mary Wollstonecraft to Charlotte Bronte, and they have been similarly treated by their biographers, as well. Wollstonecraft’s biography begins with the incomparable William Godwin, her grieving husband, who commemorated his courageous wife in a candid and controversial memoir-biography.

Charlotte Bronte’s biographer-advocate Elizabeth Gaskell produced a vivid Victorian version of her subject, which also shocked readers not used to reading the intimate letters of their cherished writers.

Although Godwin’s candor and Gaskell’s disclosures created difficulties for Wollstonecraft’s and Bronte’s reputations, in both cases the biographers (writing as intimates of their subjects) were able to command the world’s attention. Now Lyndall Gordon, author of “Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life” (1995), has turned her attention to Wollstonecraft, and her biography (Harper-Collins, 576 pages, $29.95) is, like Mrs. Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Bronte, a vindication – although unlike her distinguished predecessor, Ms. Gordon does not suppress evidence to the contrary. Instead, Ms. Gordon shows how the supposedly worst aspects of her subject are inseparable from the best.

Wollstonecraft has often been presented as a complainer, a demanding and self-pitying woman who chose her mates (the self-involved artist Henry Fuseli and that American adventurer Gilbert Imlay) poorly before settling for the steady Godwin, who did his wife no service by portraying her, warts and all. Other biographers also sought to vindicate Wollstonecraft. Ms. Gordon pays tribute to “Claire Tomalin’s enduring portrait,” Janet Todd’s “scholarship and wide knowledge of women in the eighteenth century,” and “Diane Jacobs’s engaging succinctness.” But what Ms. Gordon wishes us to experience is a kind of conversion experience.

She knows, for example, that the whining Wollstonecraft of the letters is not the whole person, and that to rely on the letters alone (such a tempting enterprise for biographers!) is misleading. Like Rebecca West, a world-class complainer, Wollstonecraft vented in letters that do not do justice to her spunky, robust approach to life. Knowing that her subject is larger than her letters, Ms. Gordon points out: “To be great, neither innate ability, nor ideas, nor ready words, nor shafts of criticism were enough: there had to be the character to press on. She had the will to rise again when prospects appeared to fade and life felt untenable.” Note Ms. Gordon’s use of the term “character,” a word she uses to emphasize what Wollstonecraft was to make of herself.

Like Charlotte Bronte, Wollstonecraft worked at the demeaning profession of governess, one of the few occupations open to 18th-century women. More successful than Bronte, Wollstonecraft bent the system to suit herself, preserving her independence of mind and her wit to such an extent that her employers’ friends sought her out for their parties, and one of her pupils became a rampant feminist. Wollstonecraft had Jane Eyre’s fire, but she bettered Jane in making her superiors acknowledge her superiority. Wollstonecraft could have become a sort of prized pet among the gentry, Ms. Gordon shows, but she had already started her own school (it failed when she went off to nurse a dying friend) and jettisoned her role as governess to set off for revolutionary France, determined to become, in her own words, “a new genus.”

I am then going to be the first of a new genus – I tremble at the attempt … My undertaking would subject me to ridicule – and an inundation of friendly advice, to which I cannot listen – I must be independent …You know I was not born to tread in the beaten track – the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.

But, as Ms. Gordon shows, Wollstonecraft’s life was not just that of a dissenting radical. Wollstonecraft, a devout Anglican, went to see that arch misogynist, Dr. Samuel Johnson, on his deathbed. It was Johnson, remember, who said that a woman preaching was like a dog standing on its hind legs; one marveled not that it was done well but that it was done at all. Ms. Gordon does not relate this anecdote, but she does have two pages that show the genuine affinity between these seeming opposites.

Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” may be full of feminist fire, but like Wollstonecraft, Jane acknowledges that, in certain respects, Rochester is her master – however badly that master may have behaved. Bronte termed John Stuart Mill’s famous treatise on the subjection of women excessively intellectual. He did not take into account the feelings that tied women to their homes and families. She did not disagree with his main point – that women should be allowed to attempt any occupation that interested them – but his argument seemed too logical and too removed from the emotions women actually experienced when confronting the choices open to them.

Mary Wollstonecraft lived in a world that treated her like a worm, a world in which Lord Chesterfield said women were “but children of larger growth.” Even Wollstonecraft’s beloved Rousseau made women into not much more than playthings, so that she has to take issue with him in “The Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” demonstrating that the rule of reason he sought to effect could not be denied to women. Her aspirations to greatness, and her desire to make herself known, keep breaking through Ms. Gordon’s wonderfully wrought book like flashes of lightning.

Of course, Wollstonecraft moaned and whimpered and griped (one can almost hear the exasperation in Ms. Gordon’s voice):

Cries and sighs were commonplaces of 18th-century sensibility, introduced in the 1740s by Richardson’s hugely successful novels Pamela and Clarissa, whose heroine pits her integrity against those who control the world (exploiters, bullies, rakes). Clarissa is forever having her laces cut when she falls in a faint. She exhibits the virtue of weeping. It rebukes the heartless and vindicates her honesty. Mary’s sighs signal in the same way the honest, unprotected woman at odds with the world, a position she shared with her sisters.

There it is again – that word vindication – a word at the heart of this biography, which seeks to justify and defend but also to assert and to prove.

Having written a biography of Rebecca West, I was struck throughout this book at similarities between her and Wollstonecraft, and thought with eagerness about the possibility that Ms. Gordon might now turn her attention to West, to complete her triptych of modernity.

Like Bronte and Wollstonecraft, she was feminist in no simple sense. She understood that Bronte’s political thoughts could not be logically separated from what she felt – as West made clear in her brilliant essay on her predecessor’s searing depiction of the “agonizing experiences of our childhood.” Yet Wollstonecraft’s story really was reincarnated in the life of Rebecca West.

When she spirited her sister away from a tyrannical husband, Wollstonecraft took her sister into hiding, making her, in a sense, dead to the world – which is precisely the plot of West’s neglected masterpiece, “Parthenope,” a magical portrayal of a woman who engineers a new life for her sisters by contriving an incident in which they are all thought to have been murdered. Instead, they find, like Wollstonecraft, new hope and life in France.

Similarly Wollstonecraft, like West, became suicidal when the man she wanted rejected her. But in both cases, thoughts of self-destruction occurred not because these women were female but because they were indeed so alone. They constituted a new genus in a world that was not commensurate with the immensity of their characters.