Mary Wollstonecraft Biography

English author Mary Wollstonecraft is the author of 1792’s A Vindication for the Rights of Woman, one of the earliest treatises to advocate equal rights for women.

She began publishing in the late 1780s in London, one of her first works being Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), informed by her earlier career as a teacher and governess. In 1788 she started working for publisher James Johnson, and while there published she novel Mary: A Fiction (1788) and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a defense of the principles of the French Revolution.  She traveled to Paris to witness events and fell in love with an American — she posed as his wife and they had a daughter, Fanny, but the relationship ended and Wollstonecraft tried to commit suicide.

She returned to London and mixed with liberal writers such as Thomas Paine and William Godwin, with whom she had a daughter, Mary, who would grow up to be Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Her 1792 work A Vindication for the Rights of Woman was controversial at the time, and after she died in 1797 — eleven days after giving birth to Mary — Wellstonecraft was dismissed or forgotten. The suffragette movement in the United States in the second half of the 19th century revived her works, and since then Wollstonecraft has been considered a visionary influence.