Mary Wollstonecraft is widely hailed as the mother of modern feminism. The book that made her famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a work of worldwide renown. Yet the range of her achievements as a thinker and writer reach far beyond this text. She was a multi-faceted author, and although the condition of women was a constant preoccupation throughout her life, she wrote on a wide variety of topics and in a range of literary forms, some of which she created herself.

This Very Short Introduction examines the conditions for Wollstonecraft's emergence as a feminist, but also her status as an educator, a political thinker, and a romantic. E. J. Clery also considers the reception Mary Wollstonecraft has received over the last two centuries and argues that listeners need to look at her gamut of activities anew in the twenty-first century.