Wollstonecraft, Mary, later Mary Godwin 1759-97
Anglo-Irish feminist and writer

Born in London, she obtained work with a publisher (1788) as a translator and became acquainted with a group of political writers and reformers known as the English Jacobins, among whom was her future husband William Godwin. In 1790 she wrote Vindication of the Rights of Man (a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France), and in 1792 produced her controversial Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which advocated equality of the sexes and equal opportunities in education. In Paris in 1792 to collect material for her View of the French Revolution (vol 1, 1794), she met a US timber-merchant, Captain Gilbert Imlay, by whom she had a daughter, Fanny, who committed suicide in 1816. Deserted by him, Mary herself tried to commit suicide. In 1797 she married Godwin, and gave birth to a daughter, Mary (the future Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), but died soon afterwards.

Bibliography: Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974)