
Updated 22 August 2024: Just to highlight this blog post is still a work-in-progress, published early in draft form for my MA history project assessment. The post will be completed and re-published in the coming months. Thank you for your patience. Do please get in touch via the Comments section below or Contact me directly if you have any questions or comment about this topic in the meantime.
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.
Featured locations:
1786-1787: From school founder to governess


“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.


Irish origins in Ballyshannon & Spitalfields
“Her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, was the son of a prosperous Spitalfields manufacturer of Irish birth....[Her mother was] Elizabeth Dixon, the daughter of a gentleman in good position, of Ballyshannon”
[Source: The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, by Mary Wollstonecraft and Roger Ingpen (1917). Ingpen, Preface, p. v]



1792-1795: "an impulsive Irish spirit" in revolutionary France
[Note: this is Ingpen's choice of phrase in The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, by Mary Wollstonecraft and Roger Ingpen (1917). Ingpen, Preface, p. xix]
Ireland and the next generation: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
From Donegal as a setting for Frankenstein....
- see Professor Claire Connolly's ‘Frankenstein’s Ireland: A ‘wretched’ place with ‘traces of civilisation’ in The Irish Times, 27 October 2018 [paywall].
....to Frankenstein's monster as a representation of Irish nationalism
- see Punch cartoon in reaction to the Phoenix Park murders of 1882


Coming soon - closing reflection on how Mary Wollstonecraft's life illustrates the deep entanglement of British and Irish society and politics. Should we think of Mary Wollstonecraft as an 18th century version of 'second-generation irish'? How did she view Ireland?
What do you think?
Blog sources & further resources
Ireland and A Vindication of the Rights of Women
The question of how Wollstonecraft's 'radical class and gender analyses' were influenced by her work as a governess in Ireland is explored by Jenny McAuley:
In her own words
Letters written by Mary Wollstonecraft during her time in Ireland can be read in C. Kegan Paul's William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries (1876), pp. 180-192.
Material culture: Portraiture
Imogen Tedbury, ‘”That hyena in petticoats”: how artists have portrayed Mary Wollstonecraft’, Apollo: The international Art magazine, 17 November 2020.
Reading Irish Gothic fiction
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is discussed by Jarlath Killeen in The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 5, 14, 15, 17-18. Available as an open access title here and here.
Urban history: Henrietta Street, Dublin 1
Today, Henrietta Street is 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, 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.
More resources - coming soon
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