Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children. Her father squandered the family's comfortable income on speculative projects, and they were often forced to move.

In 1778 she left home to work as a lady's companion in Bath. She later set up a school at Newington Green with her sisters and her friend Fanny, and worked as a governess in Ireland, before deciding to live by her pen, a radical choice when few women could support themselves by writing. In London the publisher Joseph Johnson helped her find work translating and reviewing. Her reply to Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), made her famous.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the book on this site, followed. It argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but only appear so because they lack education, and that both should be treated as rational beings. That December she went to Paris, where she lived through the Revolution and had a daughter, Fanny, with the American Gilbert Imlay, who later left her. Her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) was her most popular book in the 1790s.

In 1797 she married the philosopher William Godwin. She died on 10 September that year, aged 38, eleven days after giving birth to their daughter Mary, the future author of Frankenstein. Godwin's memoir of her unorthodox life damaged her reputation for almost a century, until the women's suffrage movement took up her work again.

Sources: wikipedia.org