Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is the first published work of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Published in 1
Detail from Rebecca Solomon's The Governess (1851)
Title page from the first edition of Hester Chapone's Letters (1773), one of the most popular conduct books at the time Wollstonecraft was writing Thoughts
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1791)
Mary Wollstonecraft Portrait
Mary: A Fiction
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Mary: A Fiction is the only complete novel by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a woman's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man. Compos
Title page from Mary: A Fiction; epigraph by Rousseau reads: "L'exercice des plus sublimes vertus éleve et nourrit le génie" ("the exercise of the most sublime virtues raises and nourishes genius")
Rousseau's Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), from which Wollstonecraft drew the epigraph for Mary
Otto Scholderer's Young Girl Reading (1883); in Mary, Wollstonecraft criticizes women who imagine themselves as sentimental heroines.