Despite their belief in the tyranny of marriage, the couple eventually wed due to her pregnancy. Mary recovered, finding new hope in a relationship with William Godwin, the founder of philosophical anarchism. After their travels to Scandinavia, Imlay left her.

She also wrote a deeply personal travel narrative, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, which became her most popular book in the 1790s. While nursing her firstborn, Wollstonecraft wrote a conservative critique of the French Revolution in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. They named their daughter Fanny, after Mary’s best friend.

In 1792, while visiting friends in France, Wollstonecraft met Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American timber merchant and adventurer. Wollstonecraft also wrote Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, which asserted that women had strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise. The ideas in her book were truly revolutionary at the time and caused tremendous controversy. The key, she purports, is educational reform, giving women access to the same educational opportunities as men. Instead, she states that society breeds 'gentle domestic brutes” and that a confined existence makes women frustrated and transforms them into tyrants over their children and servants. In the work, she clearly abhors prevailing notions that women are helpless adornments of a household. Within four years, she published her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). When Johnson launched the Analytical Review in 1788, Mary became a regular contributor. Three years later, she returned to London and became a translator and an adviser to Joseph Johnson, a noted publisher of radical texts. Spending her time there to mourn and recover, she eventually found she was not suited for domestic work. When her friend Fanny died in 1785, Wollstonecraft took a position as governess for the Kingsborough family in Ireland.

From her experiences teaching, Wollstonecraft wrote the pamphlet Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787).

In 1784, Mary, her sister Eliza and her best friend, Fanny, established a school in Newington Green. Perturbed by the actions of her father and by her mother’s death in 1780, Wollstonecraft set out to earn her own livelihood. Her father was abusive and spent his somewhat sizable fortune on a series of unsuccessful ventures in farming. Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in Spitalfields, London. She died 10 days after her second daughter, Mary, was born. While working as a translator to Joseph Johnson, a publisher of radical texts, she published her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Brought up by an abusive father, Mary Wollstonecraft left home and dedicated herself to a life of writing.

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