Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft, the eldest daughter of a violent, impoverished "gentleman," was born in 1759 in Hoxton, England. In her twenties, she founded a school for the children of the Dissenters, a group that lived by the twin codes of reason and piety while working for an egalitarian British society. After the school closed in 1785, she was offered work as an editorial assistant, writer, and reviewer for the radical London publisher Joseph Johnson. In this capacity, her intellectual circle expanded to include famous political thinkers such as Thomas Paine and William Blake.

After the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, she traveled to France to write about the ongoing Revolution, where she fell in love with an American, Gilbert Imlay. They had a daughter, Francis. Imlay sent Wollstonecraft to Scandinavia on business, then abandoned her. The ill-fated love affair left her musing about...