Wollstonecraft, Mary

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97), after an unsettled childhood, she opened a school at Newington Green in 1784 with her sister Eliza and a friend; there she made the acquaintance of R. Price and other eminent Dissenters. She was the author of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), and spent some years writing reviews and translations for the radical publisher J. Johnson, who published her novel Mary (1788), her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790, a reply to Burke), and her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). During these years she met the members of Johnson's circle, which included W. Godwin, Holcroft, and Fuseli. In 1792 she went to Paris, where she met Gilbert Imlay, an American writer, by whom she had a daughter, Fanny, in 1794; in the same year she published her ‘View’ of the French Revolution. Her travels in Scandinavia in 1795 produced Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796); she returned to London later that year, where Imlay's neglect drove her to two suicide attempts. In 1797 she married Godwin. She died from septicaemia shortly after the birth of her daughter, the future Mary Shelley. Godwin published a memoir in 1798, edited her Posthumous Works (1798), and portrayed her in his novel St Leon (1799). See C. Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974).