Elizabeth Robins Pennell was an American writer who, for most of her adult life, made her home in London. A researcher summed her up in a work published in 2000 as "an adventurous, accomplished, self-assured, well-known columnist, biographer, cookbook collector, and art critic"; in addition, she wrote travelogues, mainly of European cycling voyages, and memoirs, centred on her London salon. Her biographies included the first in almost a century of the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, one of her uncle the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, and one of her friend the painter Whistler. In recent years, her art criticism has come under scrutiny, and her food criticism has been reprinted.
Sketch of Pennell by her husband Joseph
Cover of Mary Wollstonecraft, Pennell's first book
A Humber tandem tricycle, circa 1885
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
Wollstonecraft c. 1797
Wollstonecraft in 1790–91, by John Opie
Frontispiece to the 1791 edition of Original Stories from Real Life engraved by William Blake
10 August attack on the Tuileries Palace; French revolutionary violence spreads