Mary Wollstonecraft at Notre Dame

On April 27, Mary Wollstonecraft is born in Spitalfields, east London, to middle-class Anglican parents: the Englishman John Edward Wollstonecraft and the Irishwoman Elizabeth Dickson Wollstonecraft.

After a 1774 move to London, Wollstonecraft initiates a transformative intellectual friendship with her peer, the botanical illustrator Fanny Blood.

The death of Wollstonecraft’s mother marks a transition in the life of her family. Mary goes to live with the Bloods; Mary’s sister, Eliza, marries Meredith Bishop; and Mr. Wollstonecraft remarries and moves to Laugharne.

Eliza Wollstonecraft suffers a nervous breakdown. Mary, her sister Everina, and Fanny Blood decide to intervene. Mary runs away with Eliza to Hackney. Eliza’s baby is left behind, due to the patriarchal marriage and child custody laws of the time. The baby dies of illness soon thereafter.

Mary, Eliza, and Fanny attempt to make a living together in Hackney. They first seek to establish a school at Islington, but to avoid competition from other schools in the area they determine to move to and start a school in Newington Green. The historical record indicates it was a successful coeducational day school run by the three women with the aid of a Dissenting minister, the Presbyterian turned Unitarian James Burgh, and his wife Hannah.

At Newington Green, Wollstonecraft attends the sermons of the Dissenting minister and abolitionist Richard Price, which deeply shape her evolving radical political perspective.

Wollstonecraft also meets the radical Joseph Johnson, who is later to become her publisher.

Fanny Blood moves to Lisbon, Portugal, to marry Hugh Skeys. Wollstonecraft follows about nine months later to help care for Fanny, who soon dies as a result of childbirth.

Wollstonecraft writes her educational treatise, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.

The Newington Green school closes. Wollstonecraft’s absence in Portugal may have contributed to its collapse.

Wollstonecraft moves to Mitchelstown, Ireland, to become a governess for the Kingsborough family.

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and “On Poetry” published in London.

Wollstonecraft travels to Dublin and Bristol with the Kingsboroughs before they dismiss her for unknown reasons.

Wollstonecraft’s autobiographical novel, Mary, a Fiction, is published in London.

Wollstonecraft’s didactic children’s book Original Stories from Real Life and her translation of French finance minister Jacques Necker’s Of the Importance of Religious Opinions are published in London.

Joseph Johnson invites Wollstonecraft to write book reviews for the Analytical Review.

The French Revolution begins.

The French National Assembly adopts the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on August 26.

On October 5 and 6, poor women from Paris march to Versailles to protest the cost of bread before King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette.

Wollstonecraft’s literary miscellany The Female Reader is published in London.

Wollstonecraft becomes the editorial assistant of the Analytical Review.

Her loose translations of children’s books--Maria de Cambon’s Young Grandison and Christian Salzmann’s Elements of Morality--are published in London.

On November 1, Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, a strident critique of the French Revolution.

On November 29, Wollstonecraft anonymously publishes the first direct response to Burke’s Reflections, A Vindication of the Rights of Men.

France’s National Assembly adopts its first republican constitution, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as its preamble.

Former Catholic Bishop turned French revolutionary Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord publishes his Report on Public Education, which briefly raises the issue of girls’ and women’s rights to education and formal citizenship in the new French republic.

The Bill of Rights--with the first amendment prohibiting an established religion and guaranteeing individual rights to speech, press, association, petition, religious practice, and conscience--is ratified by the United States.

Olympe de Gouges publishes her pamphlet “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen” in Paris.

Wollstonecraft starts writing her first book-length work of political philosophy, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, dedicating it to Talleyrand-Périgord.

She meets William Godwin for the first time at a dinner party including members of the intellectual circles surrounding Joseph Johnson. Another member of this circle, the poet William Blake, illustrates the second edition of Original Stories.

The Haitian Revolution erupts in August in the French slave-driven sugar colony in Saint Domingue.

William Wilberforce leads the massive petition movement in the British House of Commons for the abolition of the slave trade.

France passes an egalitarian divorce law, granting the right to no-fault divorce for women and men.

An instant international success, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is published in London, Paris, Lyon, and Boston.

Wollstonecraft moves to Paris, in support of the revolutionary cause, at the end of the year.

The radical stage of the French Revolution intensifies with the Terror and its public executions of political enemies to Robespierre’s regime.

Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and Olympe de Gouges are guillotined.

Godwin publishes his radical anarchist philosophical treatise Political Justice in London.

In Paris, Wollstonecraft initiates a romantic relationship with the American Gilbert Imlay.

Imlay registers her as his wife at the U.S. embassy in Paris, though they are not formally married, to ensure her security as a British expatriate in enemy territory.

Wollstonecraft becomes pregnant. Imlay then leaves for business in Le Havre, in northwestern coastal France.

Wollstonecraft follows Imlay to Le Havre, where her daughter Fanny Imlay (later Fanny Imlay Godwin) is born.

Imlay returns to Paris, followed by Wollstonecraft and Fanny shortly thereafter.

Wollstonecraft’s philosophical history of the early, liberal stage of the French Revolution, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, is published in London.

Wollstonecraft and Fanny follow Imlay to London. Wollstonecraft learns of Imlay’s infidelity, then attempts suicide by overdose of laudanum before Imlay intervenes.

During the summer months, Wollstonecraft and Fanny travel to Scandinavia on business for Imlay.

After learning of Imlay’s continued infidelity upon her return to London, Wollstonecraft attempts suicide for a second time by jumping from Putney Bridge into the frigid river Thames.

She recovers by writing a Romantic travel memoir of her journey through Scandinavia, which has as its subtext the dissolution of her romantic relationship with Imlay.    

Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is published in London.

She meets Godwin again in April, who was captivated by her Letters Written during a Short Residence. They visit each other and eventually become lovers.

Wollstonecraft makes a final break with Imlay.

Wollstonecraft begins work on her feminist gothic novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman.

Because of her unplanned pregnancy, Wollstonecraft and Godwin choose to formally marry in March despite their previous public criticisms of the patriarchal institution of marriage as a kind of legal prostitution. Because Godwin was even more radical in his public critique of marriage than Wollstonecraft, he faced a distinct charge of hypocrisy.

On September 10, Wollstonecraft dies from an infection soon after giving birth to their daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of the 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and the 1826 postapocalyptic pandemic novel The Last Man).