Mary Wollstonecraft

Lore & Background

Wollstonecraft was born the second of seven children to Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft. Her father squandered the family's income on speculative projects, causing financial instability and frequent moves. He was apparently violent, beating his wife in drunken rages; as a teenager, Wollstonecraft would lie outside her mother's bedroom door to protect her. She also played a maternal role for her sisters, and in 1784 persuaded her sister Eliza to leave her husband and infant, arranging the escape despite the severe social costs. Two friendships shaped her early life: with Jane Arden, with whom she shared an intellectual atmosphere and emotionally possessive letters, and with Fanny Blood, whom she credited with opening her mind. After Blood's death in 1785, Wollstonecraft worked as a governess for the Kingsborough family in Ireland, then moved to London to become an author, a radical choice for a woman at the time. She translated texts, wrote reviews for the Analytical Review, and attended dinners hosted by publisher Joseph Johnson, meeting Thomas Paine and William Godwin. She pursued a relationship with the married artist Henry Fuseli, proposing a platonic living arrangement that was rejected. After this, she traveled to France.

Reader's Guide

Wollstonecraft's significance rests on her role as a founding feminist philosopher. Her best-known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but appear so only due to lack of education, and that both sexes should be treated as rational beings. Her brief career also produced novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. After her death, her widower William Godwin published a Memoir (1798) revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century. With the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, her advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important. Her legacy is also tied to her daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, born 11 days before Wollstonecraft's death.

Did You Know?

• Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.
• She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in response to Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution.
• Her widower William Godwin published a Memoir of her life in 1798 that inadvertently damaged her reputation for nearly a century.
• She once proposed a platonic living arrangement with the married artist Henry Fuseli.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track — the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on." — Mary Wollstonecraft "Virtue can only flourish amongst equals." — Mary Wollstonecraft "Undated letter to Joseph Johnson (October? 1792), published in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004), edited by Janet Todd, p. 206." — Mary Wollstonecraft "Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil." — Mary Wollstonecraft