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“... a huge innovation – so huge that its full implications took nearly a century to register. Even Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay didn’t fully grasp its potential, although their arguments for women’s rights could not have been formulated, O’Brien insists, without the ‘sociological and economic vocabulary’ provided by the conjectural ...”

“... coarsen public discourse, especially when it failed to land. An awkward balancing act ensued. Mary Wollstonecraft, for instance, condemned her opponents for speaking and writing contemptuously at the same time as mocking them herself. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), she attacked Edmund Burke for mean-spirited ridicule, while making ...”

“... and painting her fingernails’. She referred to her liaison with Shawn simply as ‘our life’. Mary Wollstonecraft had mistresses in mind when she wrote of the ‘passions’ of men placing women ‘on thrones’. In Wollstonecraft’s view, such passions gave women a power of sorts, but they were adored rather than ...”

“... were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822. Shortly thereafter, Byron and Trelawny embarked for Greece, Mary Shelley’s troubled and troubling step-sister Claire Clairmont departed to become a governess in Russia, and in 1823 Mary and her last surviving child returned to the England she had not seen since 1818. ‘The ...”

“... patriot and member of the London Corresponding Society, became friends with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft around the time of the French Revolution. One of the few – haunting – pieces of biographical information we have about Fenwick, indeed, is that she was present at the birth of Wollstonecraft’s ...”

“... self-consciously to attain a rhetorical pitch appropriate to their commitment. Burke, Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, as much as Brissot, Danton and Robespierre, tried to seize the stylistic initiative as much as the political initiative, or more accurately as part of seizing the political initiative. This wasn’t simply a matter of the struggles among ...”

“... bad writing can say little. Jane Fairfax does indeed, I think, step into Emma out of the pages of Mary Wollstonecraft: but the protest which her presence in Highbury registers against the prevailing social order is defused by the fairy-tale plot which takes care to avert her grim social destiny as impoverished governess. She is clearly an intellectual ...”

“... Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set eyes on him. Undeterred, Godwin determined to introduce himself to ‘the author of ...”

“... found, belatedly, space for imagination and even for the domestic affections; as he gave in, with Wollstonecraft, to the Gothic institution of marriage, it was difficult for contemporaries to feel that he was aloft in the same constellation. One star in that constellation might merit closer attention: ‘benevolence’. Hazlitt also saw its central ...”

“... about the feminist movement is that what women want hasn’t been that much of a mystery at all. (Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Simone de Beauvoir: century after century, girls just wanna be human, not other.) But finding the moment to speak and the words to use? Reading Breanne Fahs’s collection of feminist manifestos, Burn It ...”

“... compilation chapter Caroline Lamb falls for Byron, and Elizabeth Smart for George Barker, while Mary Godwin and Shelley shadow the literary love of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, W.B. and Georgie Yeats all get chapters ...”

“... history, motherhood, family quarrels, debts and lawsuits. Like other Jacobin writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays and Elizabeth Inchbald, she was defining for herself attitudes which were just starting to be termed ‘radical’: beliefs connecting the private with the national life and so politicising ...”

“... closest friend was the painter Henry Fuseli; his most notable protégés included Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. For decades, until Johnson’s death in 1809, they came in varying combinations to his weekly dinners, where the vitality of the conversation made up for the dullness of the menu, in which boiled fish and rice pudding loomed large.If ...”

“... William Godwin twice in an afternoon, once as ‘Jane Clairmont, widow’, a second time as ‘Mary Vial, spinster’. She brought two children to the marriage, almost certainly by different fathers. Godwin brought Mary, his own daughter to Mary Wollstonecraft, and Fanny, who was ...”

“... the medical detail is authentic enough to bear comparison with the well-documented last days of Mary Wollstonecraft. In no time the baby is kidnapped by her deranged wetnurse, and Fanny’s pursuit across the ocean to the New World provides a pretext for colourful digressions about life on shipboard, the slave trade, and the conventions observed by ...”