"An impulsive Irish spirit" in Stoke Newington, Ireland and France: Mary Wollstonecraft
- N16Breda
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
This plaque on the side of Newington Green Primary School records the presence of one of Stoke Newington’s leading intellectual dissenters – that pioneering champion of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). For two years, she tried to earn a living by running a girls’ school on this site with her sisters Eliza and Everina, and her friend Fanny Blood. But the school was not a financial success and Wollstonecraft had to close it down in 1786.
Something that came as quite a surprise to me was learning that her next role was as a governess in Ireland – an experience which influenced her groundbreaking work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. What began as research to answer the question "Why Ireland?" became a journey of discovery into the family, political and artistic connections between Ireland, Mary Wollstonecraft and her wider family.
Updated 6 November 2025 : This blog post was originally published 22 August 2024 in draft form as part of my MA Public History dissertation submission.
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Irish origins in Ballyshannon & Spitalfields
Mary Wollstonecraft's connections with Ireland pre-dated her work there as a governess. She was the child of what we would now describe as first- and second-generation Irish in London.
Her mother Elizabeth Dixon (1730-1782) was the daughter of an Anglican gentlemen wine merchant in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, the most northwest county of Ireland.
Her London-born Anglican father, Edward Wollstonecraft (1736-1803), inherited (and spent) a considerable fortune from his father who was a successful Spitalfields silk manufacturer of Irish birth or descent. While Spitalfields is famous for the silk-weaving industry first established by French Huguenot refugees, Irish silk and linen weavers had also started settling in the area from the 1730s.
It's thought that the Wollstonecraft family may have been living in Primrose Street, London EC2 when Mary was born in 1759. While Primrose Street has been swallowed up by developments around Liverpool Street station, some streets of eighteenth-century silk weaver merchant houses can still be seen across the road in Spitalfields today.
1786-1787: From school founder to governess
By the time she was forced to close her school in Newington Green in 1786, Mary Wollstonecraft had already written her first book - a collection of short essays entitled Thoughts on the Education of Daughters . But she still needed a salary so she could start paying off her debts and ultimately achieve her ambition of becoming a professional writer.
It was through a Newington Green neighbour Sarah Burgh, who was friends with a master at Eton College, that Mary learnt of a teaching opportunity. The Anglo-Irish aristocrat Viscount Kingsborough, Robert King (1754-1799) and his wife Caroline were seeking a governess for their three daughters. And so in October 1786, the 27-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft travelled from London to the Kingsborough's stately home at Mitchelstown Castle in Ireland's southern county of Cork to take up the position of governess with an annual salary of 40 guineas - with some foreboding.
“There was such a solemn kind of stupidity about this place as froze my very blood. I entered the great gates with the same kind of feeling as I should have if I was going into the Bastille”.
- Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft from Mitchelstown Castle, 30 Oct 1787.
Life amongst Ireland's Protestant Ascendancy
The Kingsboroughs were one of the wealthiest Anglo-Irish families of Ireland's then minority Anglican aristocratic elite known as the Protestant Ascendancy. But their daughters made an initial poor impression with Mary Wollstonecraft who, on first meeting the girls, described them as “wild Irish, unformed and not very pleasing”.
Historian Jenny McAuley describes how Mary's experience of living with the Kingsboroughs gave her ‘intimate insights into the privileged yet restricted lives of aristocratic women’, which in turn significantly influenced ‘her radical class and gender analyses in A vindication of the rights of woman (1792)’.
Writing to her sister Everina from the Kingsborough's Dublin residence in 1788, Mary made clear her feelings about the society in which she found herself:
“I believe I told you before that as a nation I do not admire the Irish, and as to the great world and its frivolous ceremonies I cannot away with them. They fatigue one; I thank Heaven that I was not so unfortunate as to be born a lady of quality."
- Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft from Dublin, 24 March 1788.
What was should we read into Mary's declaration that she did "not admire the Irish" "as a nation"? Certainly, many people in late eighteenth-century England viewed people in Ireland through the lens of derogatory stereotypes which could extend beyond the Irish Catholic peasantry to include Ireland's Anglican landlord class. But it was also a time of increasing antagonism at a national level with heightened political and economic tensions between the British and Irish legislatures in London and Dublin.
By November 1788, Mary Wollstonecraft had left Ireland. The depth of affection demonstrated by the Kingsborough daughters for their governess had caused Lady Kingsborough to dismiss Mary from her post. Back in London and living on George Street (now Dolben Street) in Southwark, she was finally able to work full-time as a writer with the support of the radical publisher Joseph Johnson.
Literary success finally came in 1790 with her trenchant defence of the 1789 French Revolution: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. Her 1792 call for female equality A Vindication of the Rights of Women was an instant bestseller.
Revolutionary France & a United Irishman
Mary lived in revolutionary France from 1793 to 1795 where she had a passionate but doomed relationship with an American businessman Gilbert Imlay. When the British literary editory Robert Ingpen published The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay in 1917, he attributed Mary's passion for Imlay to her "affectionate nature" combined with her "impulsive Irish spirit". However, Imlay soon abandoned Mary and their baby daughter, Fanny Wollstonecraft, in France.
While living in Paris, Mary had also become part of an expatriate network of bohemian supporters of the Revolution. Her close friends there included Archibald Rowan Hamilton (1751-1834), an early member of the Dublin branch of the radical Society of United Irishmen established in 1791 in the wake of the French Revolution. While the United Irishmen would go on to lead Ireland's 1798 Rebellion, Hamilton would not be part of this. In 1794, he had escaped from Dublin's Newgate prison and fled to France after being implicated in a secret plot to bring a French revolutionary army to Ireland.
Mary's letter to Hamilton, written in 1795 on her departure to rejoin Imlay in London, closes with a sentence which conveys the still febrile atmosphere of post-revolutionary France:
"Take every precaution to avoid danger".
- Letter to Archibald Rowan Hamilton from Le Havre, April 1795.
The presence & absence of Ireland
Scholars of Mary Wollstonecraft's work have observed that Ireland's politics and culture are curiously absent from her writing. Aside from her parents' Irish backgrounds and her own experience as the Kingsborough's governess, Ireland sometimes provided a home for her beloved sisters Everina Wollstonecraft and Eliza Bishop as well as the bereaved family of her close friend Fanny Blood (d. 1785).
"The idea of Ireland as a refuge from trouble that presented itself to the Wollstonecraft girls on several occasions later seems to have originated with the Blood family’s enthusiastic belief that everything would be all right for them once they could get back there."
In 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft died just eleven days after giving birth to a daughter with her husband, the radical philosopher William Godwin. She was buried in the Old Churchyard at St. Pancras, London where her headstone can still be seen in what is now St. Pancras Gardens. Their baby girl Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin would grow up to become Mary Shelley, author of the gothic masterpiece Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (1816).
Professor Claire Connolly has written a vivid account of Dr Victor Frankenstein's travels in pursuit of his monster creation and the significance of finding himself in Ireland, a “wild and rocky" place with "traces of civilisation" - possibly Donegal. And how the idea of the 'Frankenstein' monster was subsequently used to represent Ireland in nineteenth-century political commentary.
One of the most notorious examples of this was the representation of Irish nationalism in the magazine Punch in 1882. John Tenniel's cartoon 'depicts a ragged population coming to ugly life', watched by the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party Charles Stewart Parnell MP who was cast in the role of the monster-maker Dr Victor Frankenstein.
Mary Wollstonecraft's life illustrates the deep entanglement of British and Irish history. It reminds us that the Irish presence in London began long before the mass migration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And that this was more than a one-way journey, with people in Mary's network from the middling and upper classes moving back and forth between the two countries. The most intriquing detail for me was the realisation that one of the earliest and most influential feminist texts - A Vindication of the Rights of Women - was shaped by Mary Wollstonecraft's experience of Anglo-Irish aristocratic life in eighteenth-century Cork and Dublin.
Blog sources & further resources
Mary Wollstonecraft in Ireland
Claire Tomalin's best-selling biography of Mary Wollstonecraft includes an engaging chapter on Mary's time in Ireland. See Chapter 5 of The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, available on Internet Archive.
Letters written by Mary Wollstonecraft during her time as a governess in Ireland can be read in C. Kegan Paul's William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries (1876), pp. 180-192.
Nothing remains of the Kingsborough's stately home in Cork. You can read here about the destruction of Mitchelstown Castle during Ireland's War of Independence on 13 August 1922.
Henrietta Street remains one of the best examples of the homes built in Dublin for the wealthy in the early to mid-eighteenth century.
The still remaining period features of the Kingsborough's town house at 15 Henrietta Street are described here
14 Henrietta Street / 14 Sráid Henrietta is now open to visitors for tours which trace the social history of the city as these once grand buildings became slum tenements.
During the 2022 Dublin Festival of History at 14 Henriette Street, historian Fergus Whelan discussed the life of Mary Wollstonecraft and the impact she had on the life of Margaret King, daughter of the Viscount and Lady Kingsborough. You can hear the podcast here.
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
A biographical timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft's life is available here:
The question of how Wollstonecraft's 'radical class and gender analyses' were influenced by her work as a governess in Ireland is explored here by Jenny McAuley:
The arguments for female equality made by Mary Wollstonecraft are summarised here:
Representations of MaryWollstonecraft
Imogen Tedbury, ‘”That hyena in petticoats”: how artists have portrayed Mary Wollstonecraft’, Apollo: The international Art magazine, 17 November 2020.
Reading Irish Gothic fiction
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