Mary Wollstonecraft

About this figure

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was born in London to a father who moved the family repeatedly between failed farming ventures and drank and spent away what money there was; she took on the role of protecting her mother and younger siblings from an early age. Her closest attachment as a young woman was to her friend Fanny Blood, whose example, she later said, first drew out her own abilities. To support herself she worked as a lady's companion, ran a school with her sisters at Newington Green, and then took a post as governess to the daughters of an Irish peer, Lord Kingsborough - an experience that fed directly into her early writing on how girls were educated, or miseducated, for dependence rather than for thinking.

Her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), argued that women's minds were left underdeveloped by the shallow accomplishments then thought suitable for them; a novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), drew on her friendship with Blood. Settling in London to write for the publisher Joseph Johnson, she produced A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a rebuttal to Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, and then her best-known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which made the case that the perceived inferiority of women's reason and character was not natural but produced by an education that trained them only for pleasing men - and that a just, rational society required educating women as thoroughly as men.

In 1792 Wollstonecraft went to Paris to see the Revolution she had defended in print, and began work on a history of its early course, later published as An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794). There she fell in love with the American Gilbert Imlay; they had a daughter, Fanny, in 1794, though the two never married. Imlay's neglect and eventual abandonment led Wollstonecraft, by her own and her early biographers' account, to attempt suicide at Putney Bridge in 1795. She recovered and undertook a business trip to Scandinavia on Imlay's behalf, turning her observations into Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), a travel narrative that also carries the private grief of the failed relationship.

In 1797 she married the philosopher William Godwin, having already formed a relationship with him, and continued work on a novel, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, that argued still more directly against the legal and social subjection of married women. She died on September 10, 1797, of complications following the birth of her second daughter, Mary, who grew up to write Frankenstein under the name Mary Shelley. Godwin published the unfinished Maria, along with a candid memoir of his wife's life, the following year - an honesty about her unconventional relationships that, in the moral climate of the time, badly damaged her reputation for much of the following century.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.