The life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft, told through five great pieces of trivia
1. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a book about the ‘rights of men’ before she wrote her more famous book. It’s reasonably well known that, when Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, Thomas Paine responded by writing his celebrated Rights of Man (1791). But in fact Paine’s was the second book to appear in response to Burke’s on the subject of the ‘rights of man’: Mary Wollstonecraft had already beaten him to it, with her A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which appeared in 1790.