Godwin, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, the protomartyr of the Rights of Women, was born at Hoxton, 27th April 1759. Of Irish extraction, she was the second of six children; her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, a drunken ne'er-do-weel, who squandered £10,000, and was always shifting about—to Edmonton, Barking, Beverley, Hoxton once more, next Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, and Walworth. At nineteen Mary went out to earn her own livelihood, and for ten years was a companion at Bath, a schoolmistress at Newington Green, and governess in Lord Kingsborough's family at Mitchelstown, Dublin, and Bristol. Of those ten years the chief events were her mother's death (1780); the flight of a sister, with Mary's help, from a brutal husband (1784); and a visit to Lisbon to nurse a dear dying friend (1785). Then in 1788, about which time she gave up church-going, she turned translator and literary adviser to Johnson, the London publisher, who the year before had paid her ten guineas for her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. In this capacity she became acquainted, not only with the literati of the day, but with reformers—Paine, Priestley, and the painter Fuseli. That acquaintance bore twofold fruit. On the one hand, in 1791, she produced her Answer to Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, and in 1792 her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a book, dedicated to Talleyrand, which made her both famous and infamous. On the other hand her friendship for Fuseli ripened into love, and 'to snap the chain of this association' (for Fuseli was a married man) she started alone for Paris in the winter of 1792. There, as a witness of the 'Terror,' she collected materials for her valuable but never-finished Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (vol. i. 1794); and there, in April 1793, she met Captain Gilbert Inlay, an American timber-merchant, the author of A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792). In April 1794 at Havre she bore him a daughter, Fanny; in November 1795, after a four months' visit to Scandinavia as his 'wife' and accredited agent, she tried to drown herself from Putney Bridge. Inlay, whom she adored, had cruelly deserted her. But soon she resumed her old tasks; soon, in nine months' time, she was living, or rather not living, with Godwin, for both kept their separate lodgings in Somers-town. They had first met in 1791. On 30th August 1797, five months after their marriage, she gave birth to a daughter, Mary; on 10th September she died. In 1851 a railroad threatened her willow-shaded grave in Old St Pancras' church-yard, so her remains and Godwin's were removed to Bournemouth.
The Vindication, whose text is the equality of the sexes, is a curious medley of genius and turgidity, religion and over-outsspokenness; it was years in advance of its age, if only in its advocacy of government day-schools. We may like or dislike the writer; we cannot but love the woman, for the love that all children bore her, for her own steadfast love towards her two ingrate sisters, and for the loveliness, pure and pensive, of her face—we know it by Opie's canvas.
Among her other writings were Original Stories for Children (1791; illustrated by Blake), Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), and Posthumous Works (4 vols. 1798), these last comprising The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria, a Fragment, and the passionate Letters to Inlay (new ed., with memoir, by C. Kegan Paul, 1879). See, too, the Memoirs by Godwin (1798) and Mrs Pennell ('Eminent Women' series, 1885).