Childhood and first school
Born in Spitalfields, London, she grew up in an unstable household and in 1784 opened a school at Newington Green with her sisters and Fanny Blood.
Radical Enlightenment · feminist philosophy · 1759–1797
Mary Wollstonecraft
Educate women as rational beings, not as ornaments.
London · Paris · Scandinavia
Biography
The thread of a life.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a London writer, teacher and reviewer who took part in the radical debates opened by the French Revolution. She argued that reason and virtue are the same in women and men, that women’s apparent weakness is the product of their education and dependence, and that rights grounded in reason cannot stop at one half of humanity.
Lisbon, Ireland and a first book
After Fanny Blood’s death in Lisbon she became a governess in Ireland and published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787.
Working for Joseph Johnson
In London she translated and reviewed for the publisher Joseph Johnson, then answered Burke in 1790 with A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
The Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared, dedicated to Talleyrand; in December she left London for revolutionary Paris.
Revolution and Scandinavia
In France she lived with Gilbert Imlay and gave birth to their daughter Fanny in 1794; in 1795 she travelled through Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
Letters, marriage and death
The Scandinavian Letters appeared in 1796; she married William Godwin in 1797 and died on 10 September, days after the birth of the future Mary Shelley.
Understanding a life in depth
01A precarious household and a self-made education
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, in 1759, the second of seven children. Her father squandered a family inheritance on failed farming ventures and moved the household between Essex, Yorkshire and Wales, while his drinking and violence weighed on all of them. She received little formal schooling and educated herself through reading and friendships, above all with Fanny Blood. Earning a living was a pressing question: she worked as a lady’s companion, nursed her dying mother and, in 1784, helped her sister Eliza leave an unhappy marriage. That year she opened a school at Newington Green, where she met the Dissenting minister Richard Price and his circle of rational religion.
02Education, Ireland and the circle of Joseph Johnson
After Fanny Blood died in Lisbon in 1785 and the school closed, Wollstonecraft published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787 and spent about a year as governess to the daughters of Lord and Lady Kingsborough in Ireland, where she completed her novel Mary. Back in London, the publisher Joseph Johnson gave her regular work: she wrote Original Stories from Real Life, translated from French and German, and reviewed books for his Analytical Review. Johnson’s dinners brought her into contact with radical writers, scientists and artists, among them Thomas Paine, William Godwin and the painter Henry Fuseli, to whom she became deeply attached.
03Answering Burke, vindicating women
When Edmund Burke attacked Richard Price’s sermon in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Wollstonecraft replied within weeks with A Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, first anonymously and then under her own name. She denounced a politics of inherited property and rank and defended rights grounded in reason and in the equal moral worth that God gives every person. In 1792 she extended the argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, dedicated to Talleyrand, whose plan for French public education largely confined girls to domestic instruction. Against Rousseau and the authors of conduct books, she maintained that women are weakened by an education designed to please, and that virtue must rest on understanding in both sexes.
04Revolution, travel and an interrupted life
In December 1792 Wollstonecraft went to Paris, where she lived through the Terror, wrote a historical and moral view of the Revolution and began a relationship with the American writer and merchant Gilbert Imlay; their daughter Fanny was born in 1794. Deserted by Imlay, she attempted suicide twice in 1795, and between those attempts travelled through Sweden, Norway and Denmark on his business. The resulting Letters, published in 1796, were widely admired. She then formed a partnership with William Godwin, whom she married in 1797 while they kept separate lodgings. She died that September of puerperal fever after the birth of their daughter, the future Mary Shelley, leaving her novel The Wrongs of Woman unfinished.
Long overshadowed by the scandal that followed Godwin’s candid memoir of 1798, her work was taken up again by later campaigners for women’s education and suffrage and is now read as a founding text of feminist political philosophy. Scholars also study her critique of Burke, her republicanism and her travel writing, and debate how far her arguments rely on the religious and social assumptions of her time.
Sources & reference points