Hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a firebrand thinker of the Enlightenment, proposing radical ideas about the fundamental rights of women, and her life was just as exciting as her work,

taking in a front row seat at the French Revolution, a treasure hunt for stolen silver along the

Norwegian coast, and courting scandal by giving birth outside of wedlock. In today's

life of the week episode, Ellie Cawthorne spoke to B. Rowlitz, author of a book on

Wollstonecraft called In Search of Mary to find out more about her life and legacy.

Thank you so much for joining me, B, on today's Life of the Week episode, we're going to be

delving into the life, work and legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft.

So for anyone listening who maybe isn't familiar with that name,

I wonder if you could start by just offering us a brief introduction to her.

Who was she and why was she such a significant historical figure?

Mary Wollstonecraft is a massively significant historical figure, very little known, but

hopefully by the end of our conversation, people have a much more rounded sense. But the headlines are,

she's one of the key enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century. So she was an early architect

of what we now call human rights. She was reaching for that language before it even existed.

And we call her the foremother of feminism. Feminism, of course, developed in different ways all

around the world. But for Western feminism, she's very much the leader in that ideology

and was the first person in the English language to call for gender equality. And, you know,

fun fact, Frankenstein's grandmother. I mean, where do you

want me to start? I mean, fantastic. I think that's given listeners a taster of what's to come.

But I wonder if now we can basically flip right back to the very beginning. What do we know about

Mary's early life and perhaps how it shaped her later thinking?

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