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,