Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on the 27th of April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, into a family that would become a cautionary tale of domestic violence and financial ruin. Her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, squandered a comfortable inheritance on speculative projects, leaving the family in a state of constant instability that forced them to move repeatedly during her childhood. The situation grew so dire that her father eventually compelled her to hand over money she would have inherited upon reaching maturity. More terrifying than the poverty was the violence; her father was a violent man who beat his wife in drunken rages. As a teenager, Mary would lie outside her mother's bedroom door, listening to the sounds of abuse, effectively playing a maternal role for her mother and her sisters, Everina and Eliza. This early exposure to the fragility of women's lives and the brutality of unchecked male power would become the bedrock of her future philosophy. She did not merely observe these injustices; she internalized them, developing a fierce protectiveness that would later drive her to persuade her sister Eliza to leave her abusive husband and infant, a decision that cost Eliza her social standing and condemned her to a life of poverty and hard work. The human costs were severe, but Mary's willingness to challenge social norms was absolute, setting the stage for a life that would constantly push against the boundaries of what a woman was allowed to be.

The First Of A New Genus

In 1784, Mary Wollstonecraft made the radical decision to leave her family home and strike out on her own, a move that was nearly unheard of for a woman of her station. She accepted a job as a lady's companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow in Bath, but the experience was miserable; Dawson was irascible, and Wollstonecraft found the role degrading. After her mother died in 1780, she returned home to care for her, and then moved in with her friend Fanny Blood, a relationship that would define her early emotional life. They envisioned a female utopia, planning to rent rooms together and support each other financially and emotionally, but economic realities crushed the dream. When Fanny Blood became engaged and moved to Lisbon, Portugal, to improve her failing health, Wollstonecraft abandoned her school in Newington Green to nurse her friend, only to watch her die in 1785. The grief was devastating and became the inspiration for her first novel, Mary: A Fiction. Yet, from this tragedy emerged a new resolve. Frustrated by the limited career options open to respectable yet poor women, she decided to become an author. In a letter to her sister Everina in 1787, she declared her ambition to become the first of a new genus. She moved to London, where she lived on Dolben Street in Southwark, and with the help of the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, she began to translate texts and write reviews for the Analytical Review. She learned French and German, expanding her intellectual universe, and attended Johnson's famous dinners where she met radical figures like Thomas Paine and William Godwin. Her life was no longer defined by the domestic sphere but by the public sphere of ideas, where she would soon make her mark.

When was Mary Wollstonecraft born and where did she grow up?

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on the 27th of April 1759 in Spitalfields, London. She grew up in a family that experienced constant instability and financial ruin due to her father squandering his inheritance.

What event inspired Mary Wollstonecraft to write A Vindication of the Rights of Men?

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France published on the 1st of November 1790. She was angered by Burke's dismissal of the women who marched on Versailles and his idealized portrait of Marie Antoinette.

How did Mary Wollstonecraft die and when did her death occur?

Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia on the 10th of September 1797 following an infection from childbed fever after giving birth to her second daughter. Her death occurred shortly after the birth of her daughter Mary on the 30th of August 1797.

Why was Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation damaged after her death?

Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation was damaged after her death because William Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman in January 1798. The memoir revealed her illegitimate children, love affairs, and suicide attempts, which shocked Victorian readers and led to vicious satires.

When was Mary Wollstonecraft's work rediscovered by the women's suffrage movement?

Mary Wollstonecraft's work was rediscovered by the women's suffrage movement in the United Kingdom during the late 19th century. Millicent Garrett Fawcett wrote the introduction to the centenary edition of the Rights of Woman in 1898, claiming Wollstonecraft as the foremother of the struggle for the vote.

The Tragedy Of Imlay

On the 16th of October 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined, and among her charges and convictions, she was found guilty of committing incest with her son. Wollstonecraft was troubled that the Jacobins would make Marie Antoinette's alleged perverse sexual acts one of the central reasons for the French people to hate her. As the daily arrests and executions of the Reign of Terror began, Wollstonecraft came under suspicion. On the 31st of October 1793, most Girondin leaders were guillotined, and when Imlay broke the news to Wollstonecraft, she fainted. To protect Wollstonecraft from arrest, Imlay made a false statement to the U.S. embassy in Paris that he had married her, automatically making her an American citizen. Some of her friends were not so lucky; many were arrested. Wollstonecraft soon became pregnant by Imlay, and on the 14th of May 1794, she gave birth to her first child, Fanny, naming her after perhaps her closest friend. She continued to write avidly, despite not only her pregnancy and the burdens of being a new mother alone in a foreign country, but also the growing tumult of the French Revolution. Imlay, unhappy with the domestic-minded and maternal Wollstonecraft, eventually left her. He promised that he would return to her and Fanny at Le Havre, but his delays in writing to her and his long absences convinced Wollstonecraft that he had found another woman. Her letters to him are full of needy expostulations, which most critics explain as the expressions of a deeply depressed woman. The winter of 1794, 1795 was the coldest winter in Europe for over a century, which reduced Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny to desperate circumstances. The river Seine froze that winter, which made it impossible for ships to bring food and coal to Paris, leading to widespread starvation and deaths from the cold in the city. Wollstonecraft continued to write to Imlay, asking him to return to France at once, declaring she still had faith in the revolution and did not wish to return to England. When she returned to England in April 1795, he rejected her. In May 1795, she attempted to commit suicide, probably with laudanum. Imlay saved her life, but it is unclear how. In a last attempt to win back Imlay, she embarked upon some business negotiations for him in Scandinavia, trying to locate a Norwegian captain who had absconded with silver that Imlay was trying to get past the British blockade of France. When she returned to England and came to the full realization that her relationship with Imlay was over, she attempted suicide for the second time, leaving a note for Imlay. She then went out on a rainy night and to make her clothes heavy with water, she walked up and down about half an hour before jumping into the River Thames, but a stranger saw her jump and rescued her. Wollstonecraft considered her suicide attempt deeply rational, writing after her rescue that she had only to lament that, when the bitterness of death was past, she was inhumanly brought back to life and misery.

The Marriage Of Reason And Passion

Gradually, Wollstonecraft returned to her literary life, becoming involved with Joseph Johnson's circle again, in particular with Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sarah Siddons through William Godwin. Godwin and Wollstonecraft's unique courtship began slowly, but it eventually became a passionate love affair. Godwin had read her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and later wrote that if ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. Once Wollstonecraft became pregnant, they decided to marry so that their child would be legitimate. Their marriage revealed the fact that Wollstonecraft had never been married to Imlay, and as a result she and Godwin lost many friends. Godwin was further criticized because he had advocated the abolition of marriage in his philosophical treatise Political Justice. After their marriage on the 29th of March 1797, Godwin and Wollstonecraft moved to 29 The Polygon, Somers Town. Godwin rented an apartment 20 doors away at 17 Evesham Buildings in Chalton Street as a study, so that they could both still retain their independence; they often communicated by letter. By all accounts, theirs was a happy and stable, though brief, relationship. On the 30th of August 1797, Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter, Mary. Although the delivery seemed to go well initially, the placenta broke apart during the birth and became infected; childbed fever was a common and often fatal occurrence in the eighteenth century. After several days of agony, Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia on the 10th of September 1797. Godwin was devastated; he wrote to his friend Thomas Holcroft that he firmly believed there does not exist her equal in the world. He knew from experience they were formed to make each other happy and had not the least expectation that he could now ever know happiness again. She was buried in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, where her tombstone reads Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Born the 27th of April 1759: Died the 10th of September 1797.

The Memoir That Destroyed Her

In January 1798 Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Although Godwin felt that he was portraying his wife with love, compassion, and sincerity, many readers were shocked that he would reveal Wollstonecraft's illegitimate children, love affairs, and suicide attempts. The Romantic poet Robert Southey accused him of the want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked, and vicious satires such as The Unsex'd Females were published. Godwin's Memoirs portrays Wollstonecraft as a woman deeply invested in feeling who was balanced by his reason and as more of a religious sceptic than her own writings suggest. Godwin's views of Wollstonecraft were perpetuated throughout the nineteenth century and resulted in poems such as Wollstonecraft and Fuseli by British poet Robert Browning. In 1851, Wollstonecraft's remains were moved by her grandson Sir Percy Shelley, 3rd Baronet, to his family tomb in St Peter's Church, Bournemouth. For nearly a century, Wollstonecraft's reputation lay in tatters; she was pilloried by such writers as Maria Edgeworth, who patterned the freakish Harriet Freke in Belinda after her. Other novelists such as Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, Fanny Burney, and Jane West created similar figures, all to teach a moral lesson to their readers. Jane Austen never mentioned her by name, but several of her novels contain positive allusions to Wollstonecraft's work. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Wickham seems to be based upon the sort of man Wollstonecraft claimed that standing armies produce, while the sarcastic remarks of protagonist Elizabeth Bennet about female accomplishments closely echo Wollstonecraft's condemnation of these activities. The balance a woman must strike between feelings and reason in Sense and Sensibility follows what Wollstonecraft recommended in her novel Mary, while the moral equivalence Austen drew in Mansfield Park between slavery and the treatment of women in society back home tracks one of Wollstonecraft's favourite arguments. In Persuasion, Austen's characterization of Anne Eliot as better qualified than her father to manage the family estate also echoes a Wollstonecraft thesis. If readers were few, then many were inspired; one such reader was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who read Rights of Woman at age 12 and whose poem Aurora Leigh reflected Wollstonecraft's unwavering focus on education. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Americans who met in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, discovered they both had read Wollstonecraft, and they agreed upon the need for what became the Seneca Falls Convention, an influential women's rights meeting held in 1848. Another woman who read Wollstonecraft was George Eliot, a prolific writer of reviews, articles, novels, and translations. In 1855, she devoted an essay to the roles and rights of women, comparing Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. Wollstonecraft's work was exhumed with the rise of the women's suffrage movement in the United Kingdom. First was an attempt at rehabilitation in 1879 with the publication of Wollstonecraft's Letters to Imlay, with prefatory memoir by Charles Kegan Paul. Then followed the first full-length biography, which was by Elizabeth Robins Pennell; it appeared in 1884 as part of a series by the Roberts Brothers on famous women. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, a suffragist and later president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, wrote the introduction to the centenary edition of the Rights of Woman; it cleansed the memory of Wollstonecraft and claimed her as the foremother of the struggle for the vote. By 1898, Wollstonecraft was the subject of a first doctoral thesis and its resulting book. With the advent of the modern feminist movement, women as politically dissimilar from each other as Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman embraced Wollstonecraft's life story. By 1929 Woolf described Wollstonecraft, her writing, arguments, and experiments in living, as immortal: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living. Others, however, continued to decry Wollstonecraft's lifestyle. A biography published in 1932 refers to recent reprints of her works, incorporating new research, and to a study in 1911, a play in 1922, and another biography in 1924. Interest in her never completely died, with full-length biographies in 1937 and 1951. With the emergence of feminist criticism in academia in the 1960s and 1970s, Wollstonecraft's works returned to prominence. Their fortunes reflected that of the second wave of the North American feminist movement itself; for example, in the early 1970s, six major biographies of Wollstonecraft were published that presented her passionate life in apposition to her radical and rationalist agenda. Wollstonecraft's work has also had an effect on feminism outside academia. The feminist artwork The Dinner Party, first exhibited in 1979, features a place setting for Wollstonecraft. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a political writer and former Muslim who is critical of Islam in general and its dictates regarding women in particular, cited the Rights of Woman in her autobiography Infidel and wrote that she was inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist thinker who told women they had the same ability to reason as men did and deserved the same rights. British writer Caitlin Moran, author of the best-selling How to Be a Woman, described herself as half Wollstonecraft to the New Yorker. She has also inspired more widely. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, the Indian economist and philosopher who first identified the missing women of Asia, draws repeatedly on Wollstonecraft as a political philosopher in The Idea of Justice. In 2009, Wollstonecraft was selected by the Royal Mail for their Eminent Britons commemorative postage stamp issue. Several plaques have been erected to honour Wollstonecraft. A commemorative sculpture, A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft by Maggi Hambling, was unveiled at Newington Green, London on the 10th of November 2020; it was criticised for its symbolic depiction rather than a lifelike representation of Wollstonecraft, which commentators felt represented stereotypical notions of beauty and the diminishing of women. In November 2020, it was announced that Trinity College Dublin, whose library had previously held forty busts, all of them of men, was commissioning four new busts of women, one of whom would be Wollstonecraft.