Mary was educated at a number of schools as the family frequently moved around England and Wales. In 1784, together with her sister Eliza and another friend, she opened a school at Newington Green near London. Becoming friends with a local minister, Richard Price, Mary was influenced by his radical social and religious views. Her own radical views on education prompted the publisher Joseph Johnson to commission her to write a book on the subject and in 1786, Mary published Thoughts on the Education of Girls. In 1789, at the height of the French Revolution, Mary published A Vindication of the Rights of Man in defense of Richard Price and as a rebuttal of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. This pamphlet brought her to the attention of many radicals of the time including Thomas Paine and William Godwin. In 1792, Mary published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arguably her finest effort, but extremely controversial at the time. The radical movement in England, including such groups as the Unitarians and the London Corresponding Society were vehemently attacked in Parliament by Edmund Burke which led to a royal proclamation banning seditious writings and meetings by such groups. In this atmosphere, Mary decided to move to France in 1793 where she met and fell in love with the American writer, Gilbert Imlay. There she gave birth to a daughter, Fanny. Subsequently breaking with Imlay, Mary returned to London and, in 1797, married William Godwin. Mary died due to complications arising from giving birth to a second daughter, Mary (the future author and wife of Percy Shelley). Mary's other works include Original Stories From Real Life (1788), On The Importance of Religious Opinion (1788), The Female Reader (1789), An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), and the posthumously published works Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), Hints (1798), The Cave of Fancy (1798) and Lessons (1798). |
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