Mary Wollstonecraft
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50 free Mary Wollstonecraft trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, when the idea that women could reason as well as men was still treated as a provocation. She lived as boldly as she wrote: she earned her living by her pen, crossed the Channel to watch a revolution at first hand, and raised a child on her own in a foreign country at war with hers. For decades after her early death, her private life was better known than her books. This quiz covers the whole story. There are questions on her difficult childhood and the friendships that shaped her, the few jobs open to a poor but educated woman, the publishers, painters and radicals of her London circle, and what she saw in Paris during the Terror. Others deal with her writing: the two Vindications, the novels, the travel letters and the works for children, along with the thinkers she argued against. A final group follows her reputation after her death, from scandal to rediscovery, and the writers, artists and campaigners who claimed her. It suits students of literature, history and philosophy, book clubs reading the Rights of Woman, and anyone curious about the woman behind one of the founding texts of feminism. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you began.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Gothic novel was written by Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, who eloped with a poet at sixteen?
Frankenstein
Frankenstein appeared in 1818, when Mary Shelley was 20. She grew up reading her mother's books and was raised to cherish her memory.
Q 02Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men answered which statesman's attack on the French Revolution?
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke's Reflections so angered her that she spent the rest of the month writing a rebuttal, and it made her famous overnight.
Q 03Which philosopher married Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, then published a candid memoir of her?
William Godwin
William Godwin meant the memoir as a loving tribute, but its frankness about her love affairs shocked readers and wrecked her reputation for almost a century.
Q 04In Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft compared silly, superficial women to toys and which dogs?
Spaniels
Spaniels was one of her sharpest jabs. She blamed the men who denied women learning, not any natural weakness of mind.
Q 05Which artist engraved the plates for Mary Wollstonecraft's children's book Original Stories from Real Life?
William Blake
William Blake engraved the plates for the second edition of 1791, which stayed in print for around a quarter of a century.
Q 06Which Quaker reader of Mary Wollstonecraft planned the Seneca Falls Convention with Elizabeth Cady Stanton?
Lucretia Mott
Lucretia Mott met her ally in London in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, where the two Americans found they had both read Wollstonecraft.
Q 07Mary Wollstonecraft's 1796 travel book gathers letters written in Sweden, Denmark and which other country?
Norway
Norway completes the title of her most popular book of the 1790s. She made the hazardous trip with only her young daughter and a maid.
Q 08Mary Wollstonecraft died in September 1797, aged just 38, eleven days after which event?
Giving birth
Giving birth to her second daughter seemed to go well at first, but an infection set in and she died of septicaemia after several days of agony.
Q 09Which king did Mary Wollstonecraft watch being driven through Paris to his trial in December 1792?
Louis XVI
Louis XVI passed by in a hackney coach, and she was surprised to find tears in her eyes at his dignity, despite her faith in the Revolution.
Q 10Mary Wollstonecraft's most famous line wishes women to have power not over men but over whom?
Themselves
Themselves is the word that closes the line, which is now inscribed on the plinth of her memorial sculpture in north London.
Q 11Which author of Common Sense did Mary Wollstonecraft meet at her London publisher's famous dinners?
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine was the draw on the night she first met her future husband, who had come to hear the pamphleteer but found her disagreeing with him all evening.
Q 12What did Mary Wollstonecraft open in Newington Green with two relatives and a friend to make a living?
A school
A school let the women support one another, but it failed after she went abroad to nurse her dying friend.
Q 13Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman attacks which author of Émile for wanting women educated to please men?
Rousseau
Rousseau argued in Émile that women should be raised for the pleasure of men, yet his writing on nature and feeling shaped her own travel letters.
Q 21Which London publisher found Mary Wollstonecraft a home and printed nearly all her books?
Joseph Johnson
Joseph Johnson hosted legendary weekly dinners for radical thinkers, and she came to regard him as far more than a friend.
Q 22Which painter of The Nightmare broke with Mary Wollstonecraft after she proposed living with him and his wife?
Henry Fuseli
Henry Fuseli was already married, and his wife was appalled by the idea of a platonic household. The humiliation helped send Wollstonecraft to France.
Q 23Which American claimed Mary Wollstonecraft as his wife to shield her from arrest during the Terror?
Gilbert Imlay
Q 14In which country was Mary Wollstonecraft governess to the daughters of the Kingsborough family?
Ireland
Ireland gave her material for her children's book. She clashed with Lady Kingsborough, but one pupil later said the governess had freed her mind from all superstitions.
Q 15Which author of Mrs Dalloway wrote in 1929 that Mary Wollstonecraft's experiments in living are immortal?
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf wrote that Wollstonecraft's voice can still be heard and her influence traced among the living. The radical Emma Goldman embraced her life story too.
Q 16Which poet's Kubla Khan pays homage to Mary Wollstonecraft's book of letters from Scandinavia?
Coleridge
Coleridge also drew on the book for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, whose quest for a settled home strongly resembles her own.
Q 17In Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman, where has the heroine's husband confined her?
An insane asylum
An insane asylum holds Maria, who finds love with a fellow inmate and friendship with one of her keepers.
Q 18Mary Wollstonecraft toured Scandinavia in 1795 hunting a sea captain who had vanished with a cargo of what?
Silver
Silver was being slipped past the British blockade of France by her lover, and she took on the search in a last attempt to win him back.
Q 19In a 1787 letter about living by her pen, Mary Wollstonecraft said she would be the first of a new what?
Genus
Genus was her word for a woman who supported herself as an author, a radical choice when few women could earn a living by writing.
Q 20Mary Wollstonecraft dedicated Rights of Woman to which French statesman, hoping to change his mind?
Talleyrand
Talleyrand had told the National Assembly that women should receive only a domestic education. He called on her when he visited London in 1792.
Gilbert Imlay told his country's embassy in Paris that they had married, which made her a citizen on paper. Her first daughter was his, but he left them both.
Q 24Mary Wollstonecraft named her first daughter after which beloved friend, who had died in 1785?
Fanny Blood
Fanny Blood, she said, had opened her mind, and the grief of losing her helped inspire Wollstonecraft's first novel.
Q 25Mary Wollstonecraft travelled in 1785 to nurse her dying best friend in which European capital?
Lisbon
Lisbon was meant to restore her newly married friend's fragile health, but pregnancy weakened her further and she died that year.
Q 26In which English spa town did the young Mary Wollstonecraft work as a lady's companion to a widow?
Bath
Bath was where she served the irascible Sarah Dawson, an experience she later used when writing about the drawbacks of such a position.
Q 27In Paris, Mary Wollstonecraft associated mostly with which moderate faction, later crushed by the Jacobins?
Girondins
Girondins were her circle in France, and when most of their leaders were guillotined in October 1793 she fainted at the news.
Q 28Which 1788 book was Wollstonecraft's first novel, with a self-taught heroine pushed into a loveless match?
Mary: A Fiction
Mary: A Fiction is her only complete novel. Its heroine finds affection instead in two passionate friendships, one with a woman and one with a man.
Q 29Mary Wollstonecraft's first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, belongs to which genre?
Conduct book
Conduct book authors advised women on behaviour, but hers includes a chapter on the plight of fashionably educated women left without a fortune.
Q 30The 2020 memorial sculpture to Mary Wollstonecraft at Newington Green drew criticism for depicting what?
A naked woman
A naked woman rises from a swirl of forms. Artist Maggi Hambling said the figure was an everywoman, and that clothes would have restricted her.