Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London and worked as a companion, schoolteacher and governess before joining the circle of the London publisher Joseph Johnson. Influenced by the Dissenting minister Richard Price, she answered Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Two years later she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She lived in Paris during the Revolution, married the philosopher William Godwin in 1797 and died that year shortly after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley. Her account of a journey through Scandinavia also influenced the Romantic movement and the genre of travel writing.

Wollstonecraft is widely regarded as a founding figure of modern feminist thought, and later activists for women's rights and education drew on her work. After Godwin's candid memoir revealed details of her personal life, her reputation suffered for much of the 19th century, and critics used her biography to dismiss her ideas. Scholars today read her variously as a liberal, a republican and a moral philosopher, and Amartya Sen has noted her call for social justice. In her own time she received little support from fellow intellectuals, and the poet Anna Barbauld was among those who opposed her views on women.