Letters to Imlay

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) grew up with a violent father and worked as a companion, a schoolmistress and a governess before she made her living as a writer in London. She answered Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, and two years later wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

She lived in Paris during the Revolution, travelled in Scandinavia and wrote a fine book of letters about it, and in 1797 married the philosopher William Godwin. She died eleven days after giving birth to their daughter, Mary Shelley, the future author of Frankenstein.