“How do I do that? By spring I’ll have no school at all.”

“You must write, Mary. Write it down. Tell the world what you’ve learned.”

When we said good-bye to the last student in May and shuttered the school, I felt like the drowning French sailors, cast adrift with no ship on the horizon. Not knowing what else to do, I did put pen to paper, pouring out my anger and resentment, railing against the injustice of women like me, like Fanny and my sisters, unable to make our way in the world. Fanny might still be alive were it otherwise, and sitting next to me now, drawing a wildflower and all its intricate parts, joking with me, appealing to my better self, running her fingers through my hair. Whatever I was writing, I wanted to dedicate it to her. I told Mrs. Burgh I was calling it “The Unfortunate Situation of Females, Unfashionably Educated, and Left without a Fortune.”

“Why so glum?” she said with a mischievous smile. “Why not call it ‘Thoughts on the Education of Daughters’?”

Hewlett, when he read it, rushed it to his personal friend Joseph Johnson, one of the most famous publishers in London, a radical reformist. Hewlett thought my “original voice” might appeal to him. Johnson invited me to come to London at once. I washed my hair, considered what to wear, decided on exactly what I wore every day (what good would it be pretending to be someone else?), and took the next coach for the city, arriving at his offices near St. Paul’s.

“I like the way you think and write, Miss Wollstonecraft,” he said at our first meeting, sitting with my pages stacked on the desk in front of him.

Johnson was small and tightly made, with a sharp-cut jaw and slender nose. He wore his hair with two stiff curls above his ears, and a neatish mop on top. He had long fingers and fingernails, as I’d never seen on a man. Dressed in austere black, he welcomed me with the warmth of our mutual friend, Hewlett, but it was just the two of us now. I found it harrowing to have my future once again in someone else’s hands, even if I had less than nothing to lose.

“It’s direct and to the point,” he said. “No unnecessary flourishes.”

“I abhor flowery writing.”

“And flowery women, it would appear,” he said, looking me a little up and down.

“I mean to be hard on simpering society misses—”

“Who apparently raise spoiled, selfish children?”

“Well, who simply raise children in their own image. It is no fault of the children,” I said.

“Of course not,” said Johnson, breaking into a smile that seemed to put all his colors on display. “They prefer to make girls into creatures too delicate to think for themselves.”

“Yes, we must hammer their bold, creative spirit out of them as early as possible.”