50 Fun Facts About Mary Wollstonecraft

Which Gothic novel was written by Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, who eloped with a poet at sixteen?

Frankenstein appeared in 1818, when Mary Shelley was 20. She grew up reading her mother's books and was raised to cherish her memory.

Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men answered which statesman's attack on the French Revolution?

Edmund Burke's Reflections so angered her that she spent the rest of the month writing a rebuttal, and it made her famous overnight.

Which philosopher married Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, then published a candid memoir of her?

William Godwin meant the memoir as a loving tribute, but its frankness about her love affairs shocked readers and wrecked her reputation for almost a century.

In Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft compared silly, superficial women to toys and which dogs?

Spaniels was one of her sharpest jabs. She blamed the men who denied women learning, not any natural weakness of mind.

Which artist engraved the plates for Mary Wollstonecraft's children's book Original Stories from Real Life?

William Blake engraved the plates for the second edition of 1791, which stayed in print for around a quarter of a century.

Which Quaker reader of Mary Wollstonecraft planned the Seneca Falls Convention with Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

Lucretia Mott met her ally in London in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, where the two Americans found they had both read Wollstonecraft.

Mary Wollstonecraft's 1796 travel book gathers letters written in Sweden, Denmark and which other country?

Norway completes the title of her most popular book of the 1790s. She made the hazardous trip with only her young daughter and a maid.

Mary Wollstonecraft died in September 1797, aged just 38, eleven days after which event?

Giving birth to her second daughter seemed to go well at first, but an infection set in and she died of septicaemia after several days of agony.

Which king did Mary Wollstonecraft watch being driven through Paris to his trial in December 1792?

Louis XVI passed by in a hackney coach, and she was surprised to find tears in her eyes at his dignity, despite her faith in the Revolution.

Mary Wollstonecraft's most famous line wishes women to have power not over men but over whom?

Themselves is the word that closes the line, which is now inscribed on the plinth of her memorial sculpture in north London.

Which author of Common Sense did Mary Wollstonecraft meet at her London publisher's famous dinners?

Thomas Paine was the draw on the night she first met her future husband, who had come to hear the pamphleteer but found her disagreeing with him all evening.

What did Mary Wollstonecraft open in Newington Green with two relatives and a friend to make a living?

A school let the women support one another, but it failed after she went abroad to nurse her dying friend.

Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman attacks which author of Émile for wanting women educated to please men?

Rousseau argued in Émile that women should be raised for the pleasure of men, yet his writing on nature and feeling shaped her own travel letters.

In which country was Mary Wollstonecraft governess to the daughters of the Kingsborough family?

Ireland gave her material for her children's book. She clashed with Lady Kingsborough, but one pupil later said the governess had freed her mind from all superstitions.

Which author of Mrs Dalloway wrote in 1929 that Mary Wollstonecraft's experiments in living are immortal?

Virginia Woolf wrote that Wollstonecraft's voice can still be heard and her influence traced among the living. The radical Emma Goldman embraced her life story too.

Which poet's Kubla Khan pays homage to Mary Wollstonecraft's book of letters from Scandinavia?

Coleridge also drew on the book for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, whose quest for a settled home strongly resembles her own.

In Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman, where has the heroine's husband confined her?

An insane asylum holds Maria, who finds love with a fellow inmate and friendship with one of her keepers.

Mary Wollstonecraft toured Scandinavia in 1795 hunting a sea captain who had vanished with a cargo of what?

Silver was being slipped past the British blockade of France by her lover, and she took on the search in a last attempt to win him back.

In a 1787 letter about living by her pen, Mary Wollstonecraft said she would be the first of a new what?

Genus was her word for a woman who supported herself as an author, a radical choice when few women could earn a living by writing.

Mary Wollstonecraft dedicated Rights of Woman to which French statesman, hoping to change his mind?

Talleyrand had told the National Assembly that women should receive only a domestic education. He called on her when he visited London in 1792.

Which London publisher found Mary Wollstonecraft a home and printed nearly all her books?

Joseph Johnson hosted legendary weekly dinners for radical thinkers, and she came to regard him as far more than a friend.

Which painter of The Nightmare broke with Mary Wollstonecraft after she proposed living with him and his wife?

Henry Fuseli was already married, and his wife was appalled by the idea of a platonic household. The humiliation helped send Wollstonecraft to France.

Which American claimed Mary Wollstonecraft as his wife to shield her from arrest during the Terror?

Gilbert Imlay told his country's embassy in Paris that they had married, which made her a citizen on paper. Her first daughter was his, but he left them both.

Mary Wollstonecraft named her first daughter after which beloved friend, who had died in 1785?

Fanny Blood, she said, had opened her mind, and the grief of losing her helped inspire Wollstonecraft's first novel.

Mary Wollstonecraft travelled in 1785 to nurse her dying best friend in which European capital?

Lisbon was meant to restore her newly married friend's fragile health, but pregnancy weakened her further and she died that year.

In which English spa town did the young Mary Wollstonecraft work as a lady's companion to a widow?

Bath was where she served the irascible Sarah Dawson, an experience she later used when writing about the drawbacks of such a position.

In Paris, Mary Wollstonecraft associated mostly with which moderate faction, later crushed by the Jacobins?

Girondins were her circle in France, and when most of their leaders were guillotined in October 1793 she fainted at the news.

Which 1788 book was Wollstonecraft's first novel, with a self-taught heroine pushed into a loveless match?

Mary: A Fiction is her only complete novel. Its heroine finds affection instead in two passionate friendships, one with a woman and one with a man.

Mary Wollstonecraft's first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, belongs to which genre?

Conduct book authors advised women on behaviour, but hers includes a chapter on the plight of fashionably educated women left without a fortune.

The 2020 memorial sculpture to Mary Wollstonecraft at Newington Green drew criticism for depicting what?

A naked woman rises from a swirl of forms. Artist Maggi Hambling said the figure was an everywoman, and that clothes would have restricted her.

As a teenager, Mary Wollstonecraft lay outside her mother's bedroom door to protect her from whom?

Her father squandered the family's comfortable income on speculative projects and beat his wife in drunken rages.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that the mind of a woman raised to prize beauty roams round a gilt what?

Cage was her image for a mind that shapes itself to the body and seeks only to adorn its prison.

The rise of which British campaign revived Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation almost a century after her death?

The suffrage movement claimed her as a foremother of the struggle for the vote, and a centenary edition of Rights of Woman appeared in 1892.

In 2009 Mary Wollstonecraft was chosen as one of the Eminent Britons honoured on which everyday item?

A postage stamp came from Royal Mail 250 years after she was born, a year when commemorations were also held at her old gravestone.

Mary Wollstonecraft learned which language in London to translate Salzmann's Elements of Morality?

German was one of two languages she picked up there to earn a living; from French she translated a work on religious opinions by Jacques Necker.

Which American artist gave Mary Wollstonecraft a place setting in the 1979 installation The Dinner Party?

Judy Chicago laid 39 places for mythical and historical women on a triangular table, with the names of 998 more inscribed on the floor beneath.

Which Victorian novelist compared Mary Wollstonecraft with the American Margaret Fuller in an 1855 essay?

George Eliot, herself a prolific writer of reviews, articles and translations, devoted the essay to the roles and rights of women.

Mary Wollstonecraft's books on raising children owe a debt to which English philosopher of the 1600s?

John Locke stressed teaching children to reason, and so did she, though she gave more weight than he did to religious faith and innate feeling.

How was Mary Wollstonecraft's reply to Reflections on the Revolution in France first published in 1790?

Anonymously at first: the second edition, out within three weeks, named her as the author and turned her into a well-known writer.

In 1784 Mary Wollstonecraft arranged for which relative to flee an unhappy husband, leaving an infant behind?

Her sister Eliza was probably suffering from postpartum depression. Unable to remarry, she faced social condemnation and a life of poverty and hard work.

Mary Wollstonecraft's philosopher husband is counted as the first modern proponent of which political creed?

Anarchism claims him for his attack on political institutions, and he is also considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism.

Mary Wollstonecraft, the second of seven children, was born in 1759 in which district of London?

Spitalfields was only the first of many homes, because money troubles forced the family to move frequently during her youth.

In 1851 Mary Wollstonecraft's remains were moved from London to a family tomb in which seaside town?

Bournemouth is where her grandson reburied her at St Peter's Church, after her daughter had asked to be buried with her parents.

For which London periodical, founded by her own publisher in 1788, did Mary Wollstonecraft critique new novels?

Analytical Review made her its key editor for dramas, romances and novels, and she wrote more than 200 pieces for it.

In which French port was Mary Wollstonecraft's first daughter born in May 1794, during the Terror?

Le Havre was also where she wrote her history of the early Revolution, which was published in London that December.

Which Welsh minister and backer of the American Revolution became Mary Wollstonecraft's friend and mentor?

Richard Price welcomed believers of all kinds to his services at Newington Green, and she later wrote Rights of Men partly in his defence.

Which painter, hailed as the Cornish wonder, made portraits of Mary Wollstonecraft and Charles James Fox?

John Opie reached London in 1781 billed as a self-taught prodigy, though his mentor had in fact given him a considerable artistic training.

In Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life, which wise guardian re-educates two girls?

Mrs. Mason so impressed Margaret King, one of the author's real pupils, that King later adopted the name as her own pseudonym.

Mary Wollstonecraft was first buried in 1797 in which London churchyard, where a memorial tomb remains?

St Pancras Old Church is where her teenage daughter later met a young poet in secret at the graveside before the pair eloped.

Which French writer issued a Declaration of the Rights of Woman just before Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication appeared?

Olympe de Gouges published it at the end of 1791, as the question of women's rights became central to political debate in both France and Britain.