Proponents aimed to inspire social progress.
The writer-especially the poet-frequently appears in Romantic literature and philosophy as a figure of social and political salvation, a being of a higher order whose passion and imagination have the power to transform the world. Leading Romantic writers, who were primarily men, included the poets William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Lord Byron.
Female writers were also very active during this period, however. They began the long struggle for gender equality through their writing. Mary Wollstonecraft's philosophy, as presented in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was in many ways the model that other women of the period followed in their own work. Like her, they attempted to effect social progress. Above all, female Romantic writers took the community (generally the family) as their most important subject. Their works, as one authority noted, "insisted on the equal value and rational capacities of women" (Mellor, p. 210).
Wollstone craft's life. Wollstonecraft's father was an ambitious man who lived beyond his resources to such an extent that at one time Mary was forced to support the entire family. She worked as a governess and educator to the children of nobility and thus gained insight into the ways of the upper classes and the roles that wealthy women were forced to adopt.
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