Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was the author of Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman although she is better known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She became part of a group of radicals that included William Blake, Thomas Paine, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, and William Wordsworth. At one point she became so fascinated by Henry Fuseli that she proposed moving in with him and his wife. The Fuselis refused.

Wollstonecraft, in common with many of the gothic novelists, had personal experience of the hopeless subjugation of women in the prevailing social system, and their lack of protection under the law. A married woman' s body, property, and children all belonged to her husband. Wollstonecraft's early family life had not been happy; her father was an abusive alcoholic who had inherited a fortune and drank it dry forcing her to leave home to earn a living while still a teenager. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written after Wollstonecraft had been governess to Lady Kingsborough, who appears in it as an arrogant, empty-headed and self-absorbed example of society's failure to educate females. Wollstonecraft was dismissed from her post, reportedly because Lady Kingsborough was jealous of her daughters' affection for her.

Wollstonecraft's insistence that women were rational beings and should be encouraged to use their reason, then seen as a male prerogative, resulted in her being considered a lesbian. She also alienated potential supporters, such as Charlotte Smith who shared many of her views, by attacking her radical portrayal of an adulterous woman (Adelina in Emmeline) as a character as absurd as dangerous.

Later she married William Godwin who wrote of her work A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark: If ever there was a book calculated to make a man fall in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. Wollstonecraft died eleven days after giving birth to their daughter, also called Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the later Mary Shelley

After Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in homage to her, although in it he chose to stress her compassion and sensibility rather than her intelligence and revolutionary spirit. The general public focused on its revelations of her attitude to sex and marriage and considered her premarital sex and illegitimate child as evidence of a promiscuous nature rather than the result of an ideological aversion to marital bondage. The memoirs also raised the connection with the Kingsborough family, and the circumstance that one of Wollstonecraft's pupils had eloped with her own uncle who was subsequently murdered by the family was credited to the influence of Wollstonecraft. This deliberate misconstruction of Wollstonecraft's principles caused her to be caricatured in many works of the period, including Edgeworth's Belinda in which she appears as the lesbian-like Harriot Freke who declares I'm a champion for the Rights of Woman.

The suicide of the pregnant Maria in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman sadly prefigures the suicide of Wollstonecraft's own daughter, Fanny, named for her best friend Fanny Blood who also died in childbirth.

Wollstonecraft's sister Evarina, was governess to the Wedgwood family. Josiah Wedgwood was a member of the Lunar Society with Richard Edgeworth and Erasmus Darwin; his son Thomas was also a friend of Godwin.