three men who
professed the same generous opinions, was the satisfaction of
encouragement or confirmation. She owed to others only the powerful
stimulus which the Revolution gave to all bold and progressive thought.
The vitality of her ideas sprang from her own experience. She had
received rather less than was customary of the slipshod superficial
education permitted to girls of the middle classes in her day. With this
nearly useless equipment, she had found herself compelled to struggle
with the world not merely to gain a living, but to rescue a luckless
family from a load of embarrassments and misfortunes. Her father was a
drunkard, idle, improvident, moody and brutal, and as a girl she had
often protected her mother from his violence. A sister had married a
profligate husband, and Mary rescued her from a miserable home, in which
she had been driven to temporary insanity. The sisters had attempted to
live by conducting a suburban school for girls; a brief experience as a
governess in a fashionable family had been even more formative.

When at length she took to writing and translating educational books,
with the encouragement of a kindly publisher, she was practising under
the stimulus of necessity the doctrine of economic independence, which
became one of the foundations of her teaching. It is the pressure of
economic necessity which in this generation and the last has forced
women into a campaign for freedom and opportunity. What the growth of
the industrial system has done for women in the mass, a hard experience
did for Mary Wollstonecraft. In her own person or through her sisters
she had felt in an aggravated form most of the wrongs to which women
were peculiarly exposed. She had seen the reverse of the shield of
chivalry, and known the domestic tyrannies of a sheltered home.

The miracle was that Mary Wollstonecraft's mind was never distorted by
bitterness, nor her faith in mankind destroyed by cynicism. Her
personality lives for us still in her own books and in the records of
her friends. Opie's vivid painting hangs in the National Portrait
Gallery to confirm what Godwin tells us of her beauty in his pathetic
_Memoir_ and to remind us of Southey's admiration for her eyes. Godwin
writes of "that smile of bewitching tenderness ... which won, both heart
and soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it." She was, he
tells us, "in the best and most engaging sense, feminine in her
manners"; and indeed her