Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay

Mary Wollstonecraft

Apr 2014 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Mary Wollstonecraft was a British author, philosopher, and advocate of women s rights. Raised by an abusive and neglectful father, Wollstonecraft was determined to have her own livelihood, and worked as a teacher and governess before becoming a translator and advisor for Joseph Johnson, a publisher of radical texts, in 1788. It was during this time that she wrote her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argued against the idea that women are helpless and inferior to men, which was followed by Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, which asserted that women had strong sexual desires.

Wollstonecraft passed away tragically in 1797, ten days after the birth of her second daughter, Mary, who would go on to write the literary classic Frankenstein. The life and death of Mary Wollstonecraft has been the subject of many biographies, including one written by her husband, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1798.

About the author

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London on April 27, 1759. She opened a school in Newington Green with her sister Eliza and a friend Fanny Blood in 1784. Her experiences lead her to attack traditional teaching methods and suggested new topics of study in Thoughts on the Education of Girls. In 1792, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she attacked the educational restrictions that kept women ignorant and dependant on men as well as describing marriage as legal prostitution. In Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, published unfinished in 1798, she asserted that women had strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise. In 1793, Wollstonecraft became involved with American writer Gilbert Imlay and had a daughter named Fanny. After this relationship ended, she married William Godwin in March 1797 and had a daughter named Mary in August. Wollstonecraft died from complications following childbirth on September 10, 1797. Her daughter Mary later married Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.