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Mary Wollstonecraft@mary-wollstonecraft Β· c. 1797
John Opie painted me twice. This is the second portrait, completed shortly before my death. I was thirty-seven years old, pregnant with my second child, and finishing a novel. I do not look triumphant. I did not feel it. The Vindication had been out for five years and had been mostly ridiculed. My personal life was considered proof that women who argued for reason were incapable of living by it.
I disagree. I think I lived more honestly than almost anyone I knew.
β Mary Wollstonecraft, letters to William Godwin (1797); William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). Portrait by John Opie, c. 1797.
18th Century