Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft was born in London to a family in steady decline; her father was a violent drunk, and she sometimes slept across her mother's door to protect her. With almost no formal schooling she lived as a lady's companion, ran a school and served as a governess, and at twenty-eight resolved to be 'the first of a new genus': a woman living by her pen. The publisher Joseph Johnson hired her as reviewer and translator, and she entered the radical circle of Paine, Price, Godwin and the painter Fuseli.

When Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, she answered within weeks with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, one of the first replies. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in six weeks, appeared in 1792 and caused a sensation. She then went to Paris to watch the Revolution, witnessed the Terror, lived with the American adventurer Imlay and bore his daughter, and after he abandoned her twice tried to kill herself. She travelled alone with the baby through Scandinavia to pursue Imlay's business claims and wrote the moving Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

Back in London she fell in love with the philosopher William Godwin, married him when pregnant in 1797, gave birth that August to a daughter, Mary (later Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein), and died eleven days later of puerperal fever. Godwin published a memoir frankly recounting her lovers and suicide attempts, which destroyed her reputation for a century. The Rights of Woman argues that women appear frivolous, weak and preoccupied with looks because their education makes them so; given the same education and rights as men, they would become rational citizens and better wives and mothers. Mill and the feminists of the twentieth century rediscovered her.