Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary: a Fiction Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an eighteenthcentury British writer, philosopher, and feminist. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason. The majority of her early productions centre around the topic of education; she assembled an anthology of literary extracts "for the improvement of young women" entitled The Female Reader. Her other works include Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Mary: A Fiction (1788), Original Stories from Real Life (1791), Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), and Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798).