The Raven Mother by Anne Welsh

Looking at her picture in the National Portrait Gallery, it would be easy to mistake Mary Wollstonecraft as a remote figure from the Age of Reason. Dressed simply in white, she gazes down as though looking over our shoulder, lost in her own thoughts - the proto-feminist political philosopher whose book-title we all recognise, though we may never have read the book itself: Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

And yet, if we only knew it, we are gazing on the face of a woman cast in the mould of Britain's most popular fictional heroine, Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet, admired for intelligence instead of feminine accomplishments; a career woman who supported herself and her family by the fruits of her pen; who travelled alone across Europe and Scandinavia, witnessing the French Revolution at bloody first-hand. Here is a philosopher who married a philosopher, William Godwin, and a Romantic who gave birth to a Romantic, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the future Mary Shelley and author of the gothic classic Frankenstein. If we refuse to be deterred by the distant date on the painting, 1797, we will discover a woman whose attitudes and sensibilities might have been born in our own time.

Mary Wollstonecraft was the second of seven children, and the oldest daughter, born to Edward and Elizabeth Wollstonecraft in 1759. Her father inherited enough money to be considered a gentleman in the same way that Elizabeth Bennet declares her father a gentleman to Lady Catherine de Bourgh: he did not have to work to earn a living. However, this was not enough to make Edward Wollstonecraft content, and he squandered his money in pursuit of a hopeless property case, moving his family from London to Beverley in Yorkshire, and back to London, each time moving to smaller and less salubrious accommodation. He was an ill-humoured man, given to drink, and to violence when drinking, kicking his dogs, his wife and his children, seemingly indiscriminately.

A lot has been written about how the domestic violence she experienced as a child must have influenced Mary Wollstonecraft. She wrote vehemently about the slavery of marriage - and, indeed, at this time a married woman was no more than the property of her husband, and sanctioned, by law, to be beaten by him. The men to whom Mary was attracted tended to be calm, quiet and thoughtful - often she was drawn to religious men with clerical training, usually much older than she was herself. However, arguably the greatest effect that her home life had on her was in setting her attitude to motherhood and education - two interrelated subjects that became major themes in her writing.

Armed with modern-day studies of domestic violence, it is impossible not to see Elizabeth Wollstonecraft as a text-book example of an abused wife. Mary writes of her mother's coldness, lack of enthusiasm for life, and the difficulty her spirited eldest daughter experienced in gaining her approval. With the benefit of psychological textbooks, we can see Elizabeth trapped in a situation from which there was no escape - even if she could find somewhere to go herself, she could not have taken her children with her: in the eyes of the law they belonged with their father. Mary, passionate and difficult, and with a spirit that her later life experiences were to prove indomitable, could not understand her mother's apathy: Elizabeth's mantra, expressed in her last words, was "A little patience and all will be over." Mary never felt appreciated by her mother - even although she nursed her for two years, until her death, she felt that she missed the "tenderness" that was essential to her philosophy - a philosophy she was to express as "the centrality of motherhood".

In the situation illustrated by Jane Austen's heroines, Mary Wollstonecraft found herself alive in a time when a middle class woman's only option in life for station and happiness was to marry, even if marrying exposed her to the risk of domestic misery like that of Mary's mother. It was a game of roulette, but one that the Wollstonecraft sisters, Mary, Everina and Elizabeth (Bess) were unlikely to play, as, like the Bennets, they had no dowry to use as a stake in the game. A husband was found for Bess, but this proved to be a disaster from which she had to flee, and become, like her sisters, a dependant, a companion or a teacher.

Of these conventional options open to Mary Wollstonecraft, the one which suited her best was teaching. Early on in her life she was entrusted by a Mrs Burgh with the running of a school in Newington Green. Here she taught for two years, putting into practice radical ideas that we would regard today as extremely modern. She expressed these in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, published in 1786. It is not stating the case too strongly to say that Wollstonecraft despised the idea that a girl's education should be in fripperies such as music, fancy needlework and languages she would never have the chance to use in their native lands. She objected to the pre-eminent ethos of the day that the proper accomplishments of a young woman were such as would make her an ornament for her husband. However, she did not approve the idea of the rote learning favoured by so many of the top schools for boys - and the leading educational treatises of the day.

Instead, Wollstonecraft advocated education tailored for the individual needs and interests of the child. This should begin in the nursery, where the mother - not a governess or nursemaid - should show her the greatest affection so that, secure in her love, the little girl would grow up to be interested in the world around her, nature and, of course, books. Discipline should be instilled through a regular nursery routine, so the child knew what was happening at any given time - if this methodology were followed, punishments and harshness would be unnecessary: the child would grow steadily into an intelligent, self-reliant young woman. This emphasis on self-reliance was a new idea entirely - middle class and aristocratic women were encouraged by the traditional model of childrearing and education to be dependent and passive. However, it feels very similar to our 21st century ideals for raising 'stable, well-rounded individuals' - and the methodology seems to presage that exemplified daily on our TV screens by Super Nanny and her ilk to deal with our modern-day Little Angels.

Wollstonecraft found her own form of self-sufficiency through her writing. As well as her educational treatise and political works, she published semi-autobiographical novels, a history of the French Revolution and a travel book. She lived, on her own, in London and Paris, and ventured with only her French maid accompanying her as far afield as Hamburg, Copenhagen and the Norwegian fjords. At the height of her success she was not only supporting herself, but also sending money to her father, by this time in Wales, and raising funds for her younger brother, Charles, to emigrate to America.

Above all, Mary Wollstonecraft aspired to be unshackled from the conventions of her time - to be a new "genus" free from "artificial rules of judgement". When Revolution broke out in Paris and other British citizens fled ahead of the Terror, Wollstonecraft sailed straight into the danger zone, believing she was about to see the dawn of a new age of equality for women as well as men. This hope was not realised, but she remained fascinated by the revolutionary spirit, becoming involved with the somewhat mysterious American frontiersman Gilbert Imlay, whose position in Paris is so far unknown, but who was powerful enough to prevent Mary from being imprisoned with all other British citizens by having her acknowledged as his 'wife.' No wedding seems to have taken place - he simply certified her as Mary Imlay at the American Embassy, conferring upon her the protection of American citizenship.

The story of Wollstonecraft's love affair with Imlay could fill a book on its own - part romance, part mystery - possibly even part spy story - it has been the subject of vitriol by some critics of Wollstonecraft, who cannot stand to see a rational woman so vehemently against marriage involve herself in a commonplace story of sexual betrayal. It is a danger against which she herself warned in her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: that a young woman might find herself attracted to the wrong sort of man. However, in 1793 with the Terror at its height, it cannot be denied that Imlay may have saved Wollstonecraft's life by lending her his name - certainly he saved her from imprisonment as an alien national.

In 1794, Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to Francoise (Fanny) Imlay (later Fanny Godwin, adopted by William Godwin). Although somewhat despairing about the situation with Imlay, Wollstonecraft flung herself into providing her child with the kind of love and tenderness that she felt missing in her own childhood and had advocated in her educational theories. Unconventionally for the time, she refused to use a wet nurse, but breast-fed the baby, and, believing in the need for free movement, she would not swaddle the child. Her unconventional ways and Fanny's happy development led her French neighbours to call the 'the raven mother' as it did not seem natural to them that such an unconventional, wilful mother should have such a blooming child. She even took the infant with her to Scandinavia, when despatched there by Imlay to attempt to retrieve a lost treasure ship of his, believing still in the centrality of motherhood, and the importance of being with her child.

It is sad to reflect that neither Fanny nor her younger half-sister, Mary Godwin, benefited from this kind of mothering long-term. Wollstonecraft died of complications shortly after Mary's birth, when Fanny was only three. The girls were cared for by William Godwin, Wollstonecraft's husband and closest friend. He remarried in 1801, providing the girls with a somewhat capricious step-mother, known as Mrs Clairmont, and a step-brother and sister ("Claire" Clairmont). These three girls, known as 'les Goddesses,' grew up in the shadow of Wollstonecraft and her reputation, and to them it brought excitement and disaster in equal measure in the form of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was a huge admirer of Godwin and, particularly, Wollstonecraft, so sought the acquaintance of the surviving family. The married poet was attracted first to Fanny and then to Mary, whom he romanced, it is said, by her mother's tomb. She and Claire were, famously, to become the lovers of Shelley and Byron respectively, and, by Lake Geneva, Mary Godwin was to conceive of the story of Frankenstein, a scientist who fathers a monster by unnatural means and then abandons his creation.

Neither Wollstonecraft daughter had an easy life. Once her sisters had left the country, Fanny took an overdose of laudanum, unable to contemplate the future she saw stretching ahead of her, looking after her Aunt Everina. After Shelley's death, Mary was faced with the choice of surrendering her son to her father-in-law and never seeing him or keeping him with her but supporting him herself. She opted to keep her son, and struggled to eke out a living as a writer.

The true inheritor of Mary Wollstonecraft's legacy was Margaret King. From 1786-7 Wollstonecraft served as Margaret and her sisters' governess in Ireland. Lady Kingsborough, Margaret's mother, was emotionally remote, and her daughter formed a life-long attachment to Wollstonecraft. Protected from the worst social disapproval by her aristocratic background, Margaret King lived an entirely unconventional life, marrying the Earl of Mount Cashell in 1791, but leaving him and her eight children for George William Tighe, with whom she lived in Pisa and had two illegitimate daughters before marrying him in 1826. More significantly, though, Margaret King attended medical training, disguised by cross-dressing as a man, and went on to write Advice to Young Mothers in 1823, advocating preventive medicine, especially with regard to mental health: great damage was done by neglect in childhood. Advice was well-regarded by the medical community and ran to several editions in the early days of Paediatrics. It completes and adds to Wollstonecraft's theories on education and the importance of motherhood - theories that those who have not yet read her work might not have ascribed to the author of Vindication.

Anne Welsh read English at the University of St Andrews, specialising in feminist literary theory and the novels of Jane Austen. By day she curates other people's words as a special collections librarian, while by night her own poems and short stories have appeared in a range of journals, including Agenda Broadsheet, English, Poetry Scotland and Smoke: a London Peculiar.