Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) is best known as a forerunner of modern feminism. Her extensive body of work participated in contemporary debates in education, social mores, philosophy, and theology. Wollstonecraft's works include educational texts, two novels, book translations, an account of the French Revolution, a travelogue of her journey in Scandinavia, and the political tracts A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In addition, Wollstonecraft was one of the first women to support herself by means of professional reviewing. Her work for the Analytical Review, a periodical sympathetic to radical causes, is a key part of her opus. In her reviews of hundreds of texts, we see the development of Wollstonecraft's distinct combination of political argument and cultural criticism, primarily in the form of literary criticism.
