Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft is best remembered as a moral and political philosopher. She was the second of seven children. Though her family was not wealthy and her education was haphazard, she read widely in the Bible, ancient philosophers, Shakespeare, and Milton. Wollstonecraft, with her sisters Eliza and Everina, ran a short-lived girls’ school near London, where she developed many of her ideas about female education, summed up in her earliest work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786). After a brief, unhappy stint as a governess, she became a reviewer and translator for the critical journal, Analytical Review—an unusual role for a woman at the time—and through this work became acquainted with an intellectual circle including American revolutionary Thomas Paine, philosopher William Godwin, and poet William Blake. In 1790, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Men as part of the pamphlet war sparked by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she wrote in six weeks in 1792, was a sequel of sorts. While living alone in revolutionary Paris, she had a relationship with an American entrepreneur, Gilbert Imlay, which resulted in the birth of her first daughter, Fanny. Imlay was unfaithful, and after moving back to England, a heartbroken Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice. By 1797, however, she had found happiness with William Godwin; they were married in March, and in August, she gave birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Tragically, she died eleven days after her daughter’s birth, at just thirty-eight years old.