Prologue: First of a New Genus—Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft's brief lifetime (1759–1797) encompasses all the major themes of this exhibition. A brilliant, adventurous, compassionate woman, she embodied a new sense of what was possible for her sex. As a girl, she tried to defend her mother against the drunken violence of her father. Later, she became a governess, founded her own school, and slowly transformed herself into a versatile professional journalist. The height of fame came with her 1792 masterpiece, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she demanded that women take responsibility for themselves, and reform the world by reforming their own lives.

Alone, she traveled to Ireland, Portugal, France, and Scandinavia. In France she witnessed the Revolution's progress, wrote its history, took an American lover, Gilbert Imlay, and became a mother. Abandoned by Imlay, Wollstonecraft returned to London and attempted suicide—twice—but lived to meet her great love, the philosopher William Godwin. She died in September 1797 soon after giving birth to their daughter, leaving an unfinished novel called The Wrongs of Woman. That daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, grew up to write Frankenstein, a novel imagining the wrongs of science and the rights of monsters. Wollstonecraft, above all a persevering explorer of the human condition, would have been proud of her daughter's work.