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.
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