A short life of the author
Mary Wollstonecraft (27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the founding document of modern feminism and one of the most important works of political philosophy in the English language. She argued, at a time when the question seemed absurd to most men and many women, that women are rational beings entitled to the same education, the same opportunities, and the same respect as men — and that a society that denies women these things degrades not only women but itself. She died at thirty-eight, ten days after giving birth to her daughter Mary, who would grow up to write Frankenstein.
Early Life
Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, into a family of declining prosperity. Her father was a violent, drunken man who squandered an inheritance; her mother was passive and submissive — a model of the feminine helplessness that Wollstonecraft would spend her life attacking. She educated herself by voracious reading and by the friendship of Fanny Blood, a young woman of intellectual distinction who became her closest companion.
She worked as a lady’s companion, a schoolmistress, and a governess — the only respectable occupations available to an educated but unmarried woman of her class — and she learned from each experience the constraints that limited women’s lives. In 1787, she moved to London and became a professional writer, one of the first women in England to attempt to support herself entirely by her pen.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
Wollstonecraft’s first major work was a reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France — one of several responses (Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was another) that challenged Burke’s defence of aristocratic privilege and inherited tradition. Wollstonecraft argued that Burke’s sentimentality about rank and beauty masked a fundamental indifference to justice, and that a society built on inherited privilege rather than rational merit was both unjust and irrational.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Wollstonecraft’s masterpiece, written in six weeks, begins from the Enlightenment premise that reason is the defining human capacity and that the purpose of education is to develop reason. If women appear frivolous, vain, and intellectually limited, she argued, it is not because they are naturally so but because they have been deliberately trained — by their education, by social conventions, by the literature they are given to read, and by the economic dependence enforced by marriage — to be ornamental rather than rational.
The book attacks Rousseau, who had argued in Émile that women should be educated to please men, with particular ferocity. Wollstonecraft insisted that women should be educated to the same standard as men, that they should be able to earn their own livings, and that marriage should be a partnership of equals rather than a relationship of dependence and submission.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was well received by liberal readers, attacked by conservatives, and influenced debates about education and women’s rights for decades. It fell into relative obscurity in the nineteenth century — partly because of the scandal that followed Wollstonecraft’s death — and was rediscovered by the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It is now universally recognised as one of the foundational texts of feminist thought.
Life in France
Wollstonecraft went to Paris in December 1792 to witness the French Revolution at first hand. She arrived during the Terror, witnessed the execution of Louis XVI, and wrote An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), a thoughtful analysis that supported the Revolution’s ideals while deploring its violence. In Paris, she began a relationship with Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer, by whom she had a daughter, Fanny. Imlay abandoned her, and Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice.
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)
Wollstonecraft’s most personal work is a travel book based on a commercial journey she undertook to Scandinavia on Imlay’s behalf. The letters combine landscape description, cultural observation, and philosophical reflection with an emotional candour that was revolutionary for its time. Godwin later said that the book made every reader fall in love with its author, and it influenced the Romantic sensibility — its blend of personal feeling, natural description, and moral reflection anticipates Wordsworth and Byron.
William Godwin and Death
In 1796, Wollstonecraft began a relationship with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of Political Justice. They married in March 1797 when she became pregnant — despite both their principled objections to marriage as an institution. Their daughter Mary was born on 30 August 1797. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever ten days later, at the age of thirty-eight.
Posthumous Reputation
Godwin published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), intending to honour her memory. Instead, by candidly revealing her love affairs, her illegitimate child, and her suicide attempts, he destroyed her reputation for a century. Victorian readers dismissed her as immoral, and her feminist arguments were ignored or ridiculed. The rehabilitation began with Virginia Woolf’s essay on Wollstonecraft and was completed by the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She is now recognised as one of the most important political thinkers of the Enlightenment.
Collecting Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792, J. Johnson) in first edition is one of the most important and valuable first editions in English political philosophy, with copies bringing $10,000–$50,000. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) is also highly sought. Godwin’s Memoirs (1798) is of biographical and bibliographic interest. The Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library holds significant Wollstonecraft material.