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“... Mary who? was the person I mostly seemed to be dealing with in the early Seventies, when I wrote a biography of the extraordinary woman whose works have now been collected for the first time, nearly two hundred years after her death. And ‘Mary Who?’ is still the common form of her name, outside a small circle of specialists and enthusiasts ...”

“... who look after their children and clean their houses. One of the reasons Barbara Taylor thinks Mary Wollstonecraft rewards our attention two hundred years after her death is that Wollstonecraft’s fervid opposition to sexism was based on a ‘root and branch’ egalitarianism not easily compromised by ‘firm class ...”

“... Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist heroine sans pareil, didn’t approve of heroines. Great Women – or ‘icons’, as Elaine Showalter prefers to call the three centuries’ worth of feminist ‘rule-breakers and path-blazers’ celebrated in her new book – get short shrift in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: I shall not lay any stress on the example of a few women who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution … Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Mme d’Eon etc ...”

“... is to see the same double bind in force against a writer as indifferent to worldly prudence as Mary Wollstonecraft. Her vindications of the Rights of Men and the Rights of Woman, books of great originality and psychological acuteness, are as widely discussed as ever, and yet, to judge by the number of editions and reprints, they have been demoted to ...”

“... There were​ high hopes for the son of Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, the grandson of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, but the boy told his mother that all he wanted was a quiet life and a sailing boat. She wasn’t wholly disappointed at his failure to distinguish himself ...”

“... a repressed personality, ripe for psychoanalysis; a role in the high dramas of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, his son-in-law Shelley and the infant grandchildren; a circle of interesting friends, many of them articulate enough to leave written records, and famous ...”

“... Hitchens tells us that among others who wrote replies to Burke, along with Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft, was William Godwin, which he wasn’t. He says that, unlike Paine, Wollstonecraft advocated votes for women, which she didn’t. Paine himself, Hitchens says, was not discouraged from writing Part One ...”

“... that in the great scheme of things relations between men and women were a ‘trivial matter’. Mary Wollstonecraft soon put paid to that notion. When he met her first at dinner in 1792, Godwin was irritated by her bubbling assertiveness. But he met her again, and his tempestuous relationship with her in 1796 and 1797, their brief life together as ...”

“... novels of the 18th century and of the founding text in the philosophy of anarchism, the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the father of Mary Shelley, and the friend or acquaintance of almost everyone on the liberal left over 50 of the most intellectually exciting years in British history. In November last year his ...”

“... needing the decisive experience of a first-hand witness, he soon becomes absorbed in the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Once again he follows literally and imaginatively where the biographical materials lead, discovering ‘a wholly different world-view of what a revolution required of its participants’. In particular he moves away from a boyish urge ...”

“... remarked a French gentleman travelling through Savoy in 1823 in the same carriage as Mary Shelley and observing her as she checked her small son Percy’s self-willed behaviour. She was pleased enough to report the compliment to Leigh and Marianne Hunt in a letter; and if she seems a little arch in liking compliments, she strikes the reader too ...”

“... Mary Wollstonecraft’s defenders have always found their task difficult. Writing her life to disastrous effect in 1798, intent on establishing her as one of those beings ‘endowed with the most exquisite and delicious sensibility, whose minds seem almost of too fine a texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is transport, and disappointment is agony indescribable’, an ‘incomparable woman’ than whom ‘perhaps no human creature ever suffered greater misery’, a ‘female Werther’, even a second Goethe, the still grieving widower William Godwin was forced to concede that his improbable dear was ‘what Dr Johnson would have called, “a very good hater” ...”

“... six exceptional women, talented or spirited in ways that defy the stereotype of the governess. Mary Wollstonecraft used her work as a governess to develop the ideas that were to make her a pivotal figure in the development of feminism. Claire Clairmont, briefly Byron’s lover, and the mother of his daughter Allegra, led a colourful life as a ...”

“... servants: ‘Lord and Lady Mount Cashell, Helena Jane and me pack’d in the Family Coach, with Mary Lawless, Mary Smith, Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William Wordsworth had been ...”

“... Mary Wollstonecraft​ is in many ways ill-suited to the role of the earliest advocate of women’s rights. The term ‘feminism’ and its tradition postdate her by at least half a century; she appears to have intensely disliked most women; and she celebrated qualities of mind that she tended to label ‘masculine’ or ‘manly ...”