Authors Like Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Astell

English · A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700)

Astell (1666–1731) was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and moved alone to London in her late teens. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, published anonymously in two parts in 1694 and 1697, proposed an all-female institution where women could receive a religious and secular education, and argued that women’s supposed inferiority came from lack of education rather than nature. Some Reflections upon Marriage argued that marriage should rest on friendship and equal understanding. She was a High Tory and a High Church Anglican, and an opponent of John Locke.

Catharine Macaulay

English · The History of England (1763–1783), Letters on Education (1790)

Macaulay (1731–1791) wrote an eight-volume republican history of seventeenth-century England, published between 1763 and 1783. Letters on Education argued that men and women share the same natural rights and should receive the same education, and that women’s apparent weakness came from being badly taught. Wollstonecraft wrote of her with admiration, and the Vindication makes the same argument about mis-education.

Olympe de Gouges

French · Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791)

De Gouges was born Marie Gouze in Montauban in 1748 and wrote plays and dozens of political pamphlets in Paris; her play about slavery, L’Esclavage des Noirs, closed at the Comédie-Française after three performances. Her Declaration answered the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen by extending it to women. She opposed the Terror and was guillotined in Paris on 3 November 1793.

Hannah More

English · Slavery, a Poem (1788), Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799)

More (1745–1833) was a playwright, a leading member of the Bluestocking circle and, with William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, a campaigner against the slave trade. With her sister Martha she founded schools for the poor in rural Somerset. She refused to read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and argued that women were not fit for government; scholars have called her both an anti-feminist and a conservative feminist.

William Godwin

English · Political Justice (1793), Caleb Williams (1794), Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798)

Godwin (1756–1836) was a radical philosopher and novelist; he and Wollstonecraft married on 29 March 1797, months before her death. His Memoirs, published the following year, described her love affair with Gilbert Imlay, her attempts at suicide and the birth of her first daughter outside marriage, and its frankness damaged her reputation for generations.

Mary Shelley

British · Frankenstein (1818), The Last Man (1826)

Shelley was born in London on 30 August 1797, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and died in 1851. Frankenstein, begun when she was eighteen, follows a scientist who builds a living creature and then abandons it. The Last Man imagines humanity wiped out by plague in the late twenty-first century.

Every book by Mary Shelley →

Margaret Fuller

American · Summer on the Lakes (1844), Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Fuller (1810–1850) led paid ‘conversations’ for Boston women and was the first editor of The Dial, the Transcendentalist magazine. Woman in the Nineteenth Century argued that women needed the same freedom to develop as men. She reported from Rome during the revolution of 1848–49 and drowned with her husband and son when their ship was wrecked off Fire Island in 1850.

Every book by Margaret Fuller →

John Stuart Mill

English · On Liberty (1859), The Subjection of Women (1869)

Mill (1806–1873) was a philosopher and economist, and from 1865 to 1868 a Member of Parliament, where he proposed amending the 1867 Reform Bill to give women the vote. The Subjection of Women argued that the legal subordination of women was wrong in itself and held back human progress. He credited his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, with shaping his thinking.

Virginia Woolf

British · A Room of One’s Own (1929), Three Guineas (1938)

Woolf (1882–1941) was a novelist and essayist. A Room of One’s Own, developed from lectures she gave at Newnham and Girton colleges in Cambridge in 1928, argues that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Three Guineas links the exclusion of women from education and the professions to war.

Every book by Virginia Woolf →

Claire Tomalin

British · The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002)

Tomalin was born in London in 1933 and was literary editor of the New Statesman and then the Sunday Times. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, her first book, won a Whitbread award. Her biography of Samuel Pepys won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002, and her most recent book is The Young H. G. Wells (2021).