Mary Wollstonecraft Biography Quotes 30 Report mistakes

30 Quotes
Occup.	Writer
From	United Kingdom
Born	April 27, 1759 Spitalfields, London
Died	September 10, 1797
Cause	Septicaemia
Aged	38 years

Early Life
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in London, in circumstances that combined modest means with frequent upheaval. She grew up in a family that moved often and struggled to maintain financial stability, realities that sharpened her sense of responsibility and independence at an early age. Among the formative relationships of her youth was her deep friendship with Frances "Fanny" Blood, whose intellect and artistic ambition offered Wollstonecraft a model of female companionship grounded in mutual encouragement. She also formed strong bonds with her sisters, notably supporting one sister in leaving an unhappy marriage, an act that revealed her practical courage and foreshadowed her lifelong insistence on women's moral agency.

Education and the Newington Green Circle
In the mid-1780s Wollstonecraft helped to establish a small school at Newington Green, a community associated with religious Dissent and reformist ideas. There she encountered the preaching and example of the minister Richard Price and read the historical works of Catherine Macaulay, both of whom reinforced her conviction that reason and virtue, not birth or custom, should shape public life. The school, run with the help of Fanny Blood and family members, became a laboratory for her views on girls' education. Fanny Blood's death after childbirth was a devastating personal loss and contributed to the closing of the school, but it also deepened Wollstonecraft's resolve to write, support herself, and argue for social arrangements that would respect women's capacities and needs.

Governess and First Publications
Wollstonecraft worked for a period as a governess for an Anglo-Irish family, experience that sharpened her critique of fashionable manners and the narrow training given to girls of rank. Out of these years came her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), which advocated practical, rational instruction and the cultivation of moral character. She soon turned to fiction with Mary: A Fiction (1788), exploring sensibility and independence through a female protagonist, and to didactic writing for younger readers with Original Stories from Real Life (1788), a work later issued with illustrations by William Blake. Translation and educational projects, including a version of Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's Elements of Morality, expanded her range and income.

Johnson's Circle and the Revolution Controversy
Returning to London, Wollstonecraft became closely associated with the publisher Joseph Johnson, whose house and shop brought together radical and reformist thinkers. She contributed criticism and essays to the Analytical Review and engaged personally with members of the circle, including Thomas Paine and the painter Henry Fuseli. The political crisis sparked by Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France prompted her first major polemical work, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a spirited rebuttal that defended principles of liberty and equality. She developed these ideas with greater scope in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), arguing that women are rational beings deserving of the same educational opportunities as men and that virtue must be grounded in reason rather than in submission. She addressed the book to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, urging reform that would include girls' schooling as a matter of national improvement.

Paris, the Revolution, and Personal Upheaval
Drawn by events across the Channel, Wollstonecraft went to France in the early 1790s to witness the Revolution firsthand. In Paris and other cities she observed both the promise and the violence of political transformation and began work that would appear as An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794). During this period she formed a relationship with the American merchant and writer Gilbert Imlay. The pair had a daughter, named Fanny in honor of her late friend. In a time of war between Britain and France, Wollstonecraft traveled and lived under precarious conditions; for protection she was registered as Imlay's wife, though they did not marry. Their relationship eventually broke down, leading to a period of intense emotional distress for Wollstonecraft.

Scandinavia and Letters
Imlay sent her on a commercial errand to Scandinavia, a journey that became the basis for one of her most admired works, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). In these letters she blended travel narrative, political reflection, and meditations on feeling and nature, creating a distinctive prose that influenced Romantic writers, including readers such as William Godwin and, later, her daughter. The Scandinavia letters reveal both her resilience after personal crisis and her commitment to connecting private experience with public ethics.

Marriage to William Godwin and Final Days
Upon her return to London, Wollstonecraft renewed acquaintance with the philosopher and novelist William Godwin. Their intellectual sympathy deepened into a partnership, and in 1797 they married. The decision was practical as well as affectionate, intended to secure legal status for their expected child. Their daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born later that year; she would become known as Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Soon after the birth, Wollstonecraft died from complications of childbirth, a loss mourned by many in the reformist community, including Joseph Johnson and friends from the Newington Green circle.

Posthumous Publications and Reputation
After her death, Godwin edited and published several of her manuscripts, including the unfinished novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), which extended the critique of legal and marital oppression begun in her earlier works. He also issued Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), a candid account of her life and relationships. The frankness of the Memoirs, combined with hostile commentary from critics such as Horace Walpole and the shifting political climate after the French Revolution, dimmed her public standing for much of the nineteenth century. Yet her ideas continued to circulate. Readers and activists returned to her arguments for education, civil equality, and moral independence as movements for women's rights gathered strength.

Ideas and Influence
Wollstonecraft's writings joined Enlightenment rationalism with a practical concern for how institutions shape character. She argued that women's apparent weaknesses were largely the result of poor education and social constraint, not nature. She pressed for schools that would cultivate reason and virtue in girls; for marriages based on friendship and respect; and for a politics that measured progress by the improvement of ordinary lives. In the immediate circles around her, she influenced figures such as the young Margaret King, one of her former pupils, and worked alongside writers like Paine who were reshaping political discourse. Later generations rediscovered her through the lens of liberal philosophy and feminist history, finding in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman a foundational text that challenged inherited hierarchies and imagined a broader common good.

Family and Memory
The family she left behind kept her memory alive in complex ways. Godwin preserved and published her work, even at the cost of scandal; her elder daughter, Fanny, carried the burdens of a blended household; and her younger daughter, Mary Shelley, grew up among writers and reformers and later reflected on her mother's legacy while developing her own voice. Mary Wollstonecraft's life drew together the private and the public, the griefs of friendship and love with a persistent, reasoned defense of women's dignity. The relationships that sustained and tested her, from Fanny Blood and Joseph Johnson to Henry Fuseli, Gilbert Imlay, and William Godwin, are inseparable from the arguments she made and the prose in which she made them. Through the pages she left and the people she shaped, her work continued to provoke, to inspire, and to offer a standard by which reforms of education, marriage, and civil society might be judged.

Our collection contains 30 quotes who is written by Mary, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Meaning of Life - Learning.

Other people realated to Mary: Percy Bysshe Shelley (Poet), Thomas Holcroft (Dramatist), John Opie (Artist), Alice S. Rossi (Sociologist)

Mary Wollstonecraft Famous Works