Mary Wollstonecraft was born April 27, 1759. Her father had inherited wealth from his father, but spent the entire fortune. He drank heavily and apparently was abusive verbally and perhaps physically. He failed in his many attempts at farming, and when Mary was fifteen, the family moved to Hoxton, a suburb of London. Here Mary met Fanny Blood, to become perhaps her closest friend. The family moved to Wales and then back to London as Edward Wollstonecraft tried to make a living.

At nineteen, Mary Wollstonecraft took a position that was one of the few available to middle class educated women: a companion to an older woman. She traveled in England with her charge, Mrs. Dawson, but two years later returned home to attend her mother who was dying. Two years after Mary's return, her mother died and her father remarried and moved to Wales.

Mary's sister Eliza married, and Mary moved in with her friend Fanny Blood and her family, helping to support the family through her needlework -- another of the few routes open to women for economic self-support. Eliza gave birth within another year, and her husband, Meridith Bishop, wrote to Mary and asked that she return to nurse her sister whose mental condition had deteriorated seriously.

Mary's theory was that Eliza's condition was the result of her husband's treatment of her, and Mary helped Eliza leave her husband and arrange a legal separation. Under the laws of the time, Eliza had to leave her young son with his father, and the son died before his first birthday.

Mary Wollstonecraft, her sister Eliza Bishop, her friend Fanny Blood and later Mary's and Eliza's sister Everina turned to another possible means of financial support for themselves, and opened a school in Newington Green. It is in Newington Green that Mary Wollstonecraft first meets the clergyman Richard Price whose friendship led to meeting many of the liberals among England's intellectuals.

Fanny decided to marry, and, pregnant soon after the marriage, called Mary to be with her in Lisbon for the birth. Fanny and her baby died soon after the premature birth.

When Mary Wollstonecraft returned to England, she closed the financially-struggling school and wrote her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. She then took a position in yet another respectable profession for women of her background and circumstances: governess.

After a year of traveling in Ireland and England with the family of her employer, Viscount Kingsborough, Mary was fired by Lady Kingsborough for becoming too close to her charges.

And so Mary Wollstonecraft decided that her means of support had to be her writing, and she returned to London in 1787.