Letters on Sweden, Norway and Denmark | Page 5

of an ardent, generous, impulsive nature.
One day her friend Fanny Blood had repined at the unhappy
surroundings in the home she was maintaining for her father and
mother, and longed for a little home of her own to do her work in. Her
friend quietly found rooms, got furniture together, and told her that her
little home was ready; she had only to walk into it. Then it seemed
strange to Mary Wollstonecraft that Fanny Blood was withheld by
thoughts that had not been uppermost in the mood of complaint. She
thought her friend irresolute, where she had herself been generously

rash. Her end would have been happier had she been helped, as many
are, by that calm influence of home in which some knowledge of the
world passes from father and mother to son and daughter, without
visible teaching and preaching, in easiest companionship of young and
old from day to day.
The little payment for her pamphlet on the "Education of Daughters"
caused Mary Wollstonecraft to think more seriously of earning by her
pen. The pamphlet seems also to have advanced her credit as a teacher.
After giving up her day school, she spent some weeks at Eton with the
Rev. Mr. Prior, one of the masters there, who recommended her as
governess to the daughters of Lord Kingsborough, an Irish viscount,
eldest son of the Earl of Kingston. Her way of teaching was by winning
love, and she obtained the warm affection of the eldest of her pupils,
who became afterwards Countess Mount- Cashel. In the summer of
1787, Lord Kingsborough's family, including Mary Wollstonecraft, was
at Bristol Hot-wells, before going to the Continent. While there, Mary
Wollstonecraft wrote her little tale published as "Mary, a Fiction,"
wherein there was much based on the memory of her own friendship
for Fanny Blood.
The publisher of Mary Wollstonecraft's "Thoughts on the Education of
Daughters" was the same Joseph Johnson who in 1785 was the
publisher of Cowper's "Task." With her little story written and a little
money saved, the resolve to live by her pen could now be carried out.
Mary Wollstonecraft, therefore, parted from her friends at Bristol, went
to London, saw her publisher, and frankly told him her determination.
He met her with fatherly kindness, and received her as a guest in his
house while she was making her arrangements. At Michaelmas, 1787,
she settled in a house in George Street, on the Surrey side of
Blackfriars Bridge. There she produced a little book for children, of
"Original Stories from Real Life," and earned by drudgery for Joseph
Johnson. She translated, she abridged, she made a volume of Selections,
and she wrote for an "Analytical Review," which Mr. Johnson founded
in the middle of the year 1788. Among the books translated by her was
Necker "On the Importance of Religious Opinions." Among the books
abridged by her was Salzmann's "Elements of Morality." With all this
hard work she lived as sparely as she could, that she might help her
family. She supported her father. That she might enable her sisters to

earn their living as teachers, she sent one of them to Paris, and
maintained her there for two years; the other she placed in a school near
London as parlour- boarder until she was admitted into it as a paid
teacher. She placed one brother at Woolwich to qualify for the Navy,
and he obtained a lieutenant's commission. For another brother, articled
to an attorney whom he did not like, she obtained a transfer of
indentures; and when it became clear that his quarrel was more with
law than with the lawyers, she placed him with a farmer before fitting
him out for emigration to America. She then sent him, so well prepared
for his work there that he prospered well. She tried even to disentangle
her father's affairs; but the confusion in them was beyond her powers of
arrangement. Added to all this faithful work, she took upon herself the
charge of an orphan child, seven years old, whose mother had been in
the number of her friends. That was the life of Mary Wollstonecraft,
thirty years old, in 1789, the year of the Fall of the Bastille; the noble
life now to be touched in its enthusiasms by the spirit of the Revolution,
to be caught in the great storm, shattered, and lost among its wrecks.
To Burke's attack on the French Revolution Mary Wollstonecraft wrote
an Answer--one of many answers provoked by it--that attracted much
attention. This was followed by her "Vindication of the Rights of
Woman while the air was full of declamation on the "Rights of Man."
The claims made in this little book were in advance of the opinion of
that day, but they are claims that have in our