Eagle-eyed viewers of the Netflix hit series Bridgerton may have spotted a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft hanging in the fictional familyâs residence. The
seriesâ creators included the background painting of âEnglandâs first feministâ in recognition of the significance of her ideas at the dawn of the Regency era.
Wollstonecraft was disgusted at how intelligent âsocietyâ women were groomed for submission under marriage and wrote about it with a journalistic urgency â but there any tenuous parallel with the Bridgerton fairytale ends.
Wollstonecraft spent a formative year working as governess to the daughters of the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family in Ireland. Her political ideas crystallised in the book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she went head to head against conservative grandee Edmund Burke.