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.
To Burke's attack on the French Revolution Mary Wollstonecraft wrote
an Answer - one of many answers provoked by it - that attracted much
attention.
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