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 day been conceded. They are
certainly not revolutionary in the opinion of the world that has become a
hundred years older since the book was written.

At this the Mary Wollstonecraft had moved to rooms in Store Street,
Bedford Square. She was fascinated by Fuseli the painter, and he was a
married man. She felt herself to be too strongly drawn towards him, and
she went to Paris at the close of the year 1792, to break the spell. She
felt lonely and sad, and was not the happier for being in a mansion lent
to her, from which the owner was away, and in which she lived surrounded
by his servants. Strong womanly instincts were astir within her, and
they were not all wise folk who had been drawn around her by her generous
enthusiasm for the new hopes of the world, that made it then, as
Wordsworth felt, a very heaven to the young.

Four months after she had gone to Paris, Mary Wollstonecraft met at the
house of a merchant, with whose wife she had become intimate, an American
named Gilbert Imlay. He won her affections. That was in April, 1793. He
had no means, and she had home embarrassments, for which she was
unwilling that he should become in any way responsible. A part of the
new dream in some minds then was of a love too pure to need or bear the
bondage of authority. The mere forced union of marriage ties implied, it
was said, a distrust of fidelity. When Gilbert Imlay would have married
Mary Wollstonecraft, she herself refused to bind him; she would keep him
legally exempt from her responsibilities towards the father, sisters,
brothers, whom she was supporting. She took his name and called herself
his wife, when the French Convention, indignant at the conduct of the
British Government, issue a decree