She wrote a foundational text on human equality, survived the Reign of Terror, and then had her legacy obliterated for a century, not by enemies but by a loving biography written by her grieving husband. This episode looks past the marble statue to the chaotic, deeply human life of Mary Wollstonecraft, forged in a childhood of financial ruin and a violently abusive father.

We follow her declaration to become the first of a new genus, a woman paid for her intellect, and her collision with the friction between rigid rationalism and unruly human passion.

• Orchestrating her sister’s escape from a marriage under coverture laws that offered no recourse
• Her famous rebuttal to Edmund Burke and her 1792 masterwork gutting the culture of female sensibility
• Arriving in Paris weeks before the king’s execution and analyzing the revolution’s true causes
• Her abandonment by Gilbert Imlay, two suicide attempts, and a perilous solo journey to Scandinavia
• Marriage to William Godwin, the birth of future Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, and death at 38