She repeatedly challenged a system that required female subservience to survive. Wollstonecraft's reform writings can be classified as polemical pieces, such as
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1790),
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), and
An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe: By Mary Wollstonecraft. Volume the First (1794); educational texts, such as
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787),
Original Stories from Real Life; With Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788), and
The Female Reader (1789); fiction, such as
Mary, A Fiction (1788) and
Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman: A Posthumous Fragment (1799); and reportage, such as
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796).
Wollstonecraft was born in the Spitalfields district of London on 27 April 1759, the eldest daughter and second of seven children of Edward John Wollstonecraft and an Irish mother, Elizabeth Dixon Wollstonecraft. Her father inherited a substantial sum from the family weaving business upon his father's death in 1765 and promptly set himself up as a gentleman farmer with a large property in Barking, London.
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