Mary was the eldest daughter and the second child in a family
with 6 children.
Her childhood was spent on farms in England and Wales. Her
father, Edward Wollstonecraft, steadily wasted his inheritance on 6 different
farms. He was a violent man, and Mary would put herself between him and
her mother when he was in a rage. Her mother was docile and did not complain
or change her situation.
Her upbringing was unusual because she was able to play with
her brothers in the countryside rather than being given the conventional
refined treatment that most middle class girls experienced.
She was mostly self-taught, and had little formal education.
She left home at the age of 19. She worked as a companion
to an elderly widow in Bath, which she found a lonely job.
She returned home after a couple of years to look after her
dying mother. She became the major support for her family after that, even
though her elder brother had a good job in London. She financed the education
of her younger brothers and sisters, helped them find employment, and helped
her sister leave an unhappy marriage.
In 1783, she, with her sisters and her friend Fanny Blood,
started a school at Newington Green. It was a liberal school for the children
of wealthy intellectuals and ministers.
One of her neighbors was Dr. Richard Price, a liberal reformer
who supported the French and American Revolutions, (and was criticized
by Edmund Burke for doing so). Her friendship with him was the start of
her intellectual growth.
It was a difficult time. Her friend Fanny died in childbirth,
and the school failed.
She wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
in which she condemned the frivolousness and vanity of the women of her
age.
She started work as a governess in 1786 for the Kingsborough
family, who where landed gentry in Ireland. Their lifestyle, especially
that of Lady Kingsborough, was full of the leisure and frivolity she condemned.
She published her first novel, Mary, A Fiction, in
1788. Her novel describes the growing awareness of a young woman of the
degrading and inhibiting effects of society on people, especially women.
She returned to London in 1787. She became part of a set
of liberal thinkers and artists, including the painter Henry Fuseli, the
chemist Joseph Priestly, the philosopher William Godwin, the poet William
Blake, as well as Thomas Paine.
In 1789 her old friend Dr. Price gave a sermon, ‘On the Love
of Country,’ defending the French revolution.
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution,
published in November 1790, explicitly attacked Dr. Price and the French
Revolution
Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men
immediately in response to Burke. She argued that civil and religious liberties
were innate rights. She called the aristocrats who do not work for a living
‘profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy.’ The old ways
of chivalry towards women of high breeding were simply part of the decadence
of the rich, and ignored the true suffering the most women and children.
A Vindication of the Rights of Women was written in
1791, published in 1792. That year Wollstonecraft traveled to Paris, where
the book had already been translated and published. Again, she was welcomed
by a group of literary and political writers, including Thomas Paine.
Reform and liberalism were becoming more popular in Britain.
In 1792, Thomas Hardy formed the London Corresponding Society, made up
of tradesmen, mechanics, and shopkeepers. They reprinted and distributed
pamphlets like Paine’s The Rights of Man, which sold over 200,000
copies by 1793. Some of their meetings attracted over 100,000 people. Other
radical associations sprung up all over England.
As the French Revolution departed from the values that had
originally inspired it, she became shocked at the bloodshed and violence
she saw. She wrote An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress
of the French Revolution, published in London in 1794.
In England, the Government started to crack down on radicals,
and charged Thomas Hardy and his political associates with treason. They
were acquitted.
In Paris, Wollstonecraft met Gilbert Imlay, an American writer
and businessman. They became a couple, and she was even called ‘Mrs. Imlay’
in Paris, though they never actually married. They had a daughter, Fanny
Imlay, who was born in May, 1794.
The couple traveled on business with their baby and a nursemaid
a great deal, Le Havre, back to Paris, and to London. They went, without
Gilbert, on a business trip to Scandinavia in 1795. He was becoming increasingly
distant. She published her letters to him as Letters During a Short
Residence In Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796).
On returning to London, she found that Gilbert was living
with an actress. Wollstonecraft was utterly distraught, and jumped off
a bridge over the River Thames. However, she was rescued.
She became reacquainted with William Godwin in 1796. His
first impression of her had been less than favorable, when years before
he had gone to a dinner party to meet Thomas Paine, and she had dominated
the evening with her opinions. But he had read her most recent book and
found it captivating.
She and Godwin became a couple. Both of them disapproved
of marriage, but nevertheless they got married when she found that she
was pregnant. While she was pregnant, she started working on a second novel,
Maria
or The Wrongs of Woman.
Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter, Mary, in
August 1797. She died soon after from complications, at the age of 38.
In 1798, the movement for Parliamentary reform in England
was quashed when Habeas Corpus was suspended.
Most of the details here come from the Introduction
by Miriam Brody to Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (Penguin Books, 1992)
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