In my last blog post (Oct. 2025), I discussed Martha Washington's purchase of a copy of a book she (or her financial record-keeper) described as 'Wollstonecraft's Education' in 1794, at the very time of peak interest in Wollstonecraft's work among the founding mothers and fathers of the fledgling democracy of the United States of America (beyond the Washingtons, the Burrs and the Adamses all recorded reading Wollstonecraft that year).

I originally argued that the book might not be Wollstonecraft's debut publication, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, because her publisher Joseph Johnson released it in a single edition in London in early 1787. I reasoned that it could have also been one of her other, more popular and printed, works on education, Original Stories from Real Life (London: 1788/91) or A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792, 2 edns. in London, and published in Boston and Philadelphia that same year). 

I was reminded, however, that John Windle (2000) in his bibliography of Wollstonecraft's works mentioned a 1788 Dublin edition of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, published by William Sleater, with additional material from Fénelon's 'Instructions to a Governess,' originally published in his Instructions for the Education of a Daughter (1687). 

In 2002, Vivien Jones argued in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft that this 1788 Dublin edition was not overseen or created by Wollstonecraft, since among its added material was an approving reference to James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1766), which she later devoted much space to criticizing in her Rights of Woman. 

Jones's claim is disputable, however, on several grounds. 

First, it assumes that Wollstonecraft was as critical of Fordyce in 1786-87, when she wrote and initially published Thoughts, or in 1788, when this Dublin edition appeared, as she was in 1791-92, when she wrote the Rights of Woman. There has been much scholarship to show that Wollstonecraft's early educational writings had more religious and 'conservative' themes than her later writings on the topic. Indeed, she was working as a governess for an aristocratic family, based in Dublin and Michelstown, at the time of her first book's publication in early 1787. To some degree, the book must have been a manual for her work.

Second, Wollstonecraft refers to Fénelon's other great work on education, The Adventures of Telemachus (1699), in Ch. 9 of the Rights of Woman. So the addition of substantial material from Fénelon was also likely in her wheelhouse circa 1787, when she was living in Dublin, working as a governness for the aristocratic Kingsborough family, teaching their daughters French and Italian, and reading and teaching them books from their impressive library.

Third, Wollstonecraft could have arranged the addition of the paratext attached to the Dublin edition of Thoughts after the title page and before the author's preface: a selection from a positive book review of the work (from 'The English Review') in which the author is referred to as 'Mrs. Wollstonecraft' (she was, in fact, a 'Miss' at the time, but reviewers sometimes assumed that only a married woman would have been able to publish a book, and thus added the formal address of 'Mrs.').  We know that Wollstonecraft carefully tracked the reception of her own work, and could have received a copy of this review from her publisher Joseph Johnson while she was living in Dublin (indeed, she asked him to send her a copy of Thoughts to her address in Dublin). Further research needs to be done, but it seems possible that Wollstonecraft may have met William Sleater while in Dublin, and helped to arrange the production and publication of the 1788 edition, with the inclusion of the new framing texts from the English Review, Fénelon, and an anonymous Address to Mothers, and perhaps even the addition of two chapters, on 'Obstinacy' and 'Needle-work', to the text itself. Wollstonecraft had experience as a seamstress while living with the Blood family in 1782-84, and her family's roots were in the silk-weaving industry of Spitalfields. The Rights of Woman is replete with knowing references to women's work in the fabric and clothing design industries.

Regardless of whether Wollstonecraft oversaw or contributed to the production of the Dublin edition of Mrs. Wollstonecraft's Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, the parallel between the published title and the handwritten record of a 1794 book purchase by Martha Washington ('Wollstonecraft's Education') suggests to me that the 1788 Dublin edition of Thoughts might have been Washington's copy. 

This gives me more reason to think that the American MW and the first 'First Lady' of the United States was reading the British MW's first book, probably in a slightly revised and expanded version, in 1794. 

On the other hand, I continue to think it is highly probable that the American MW was reading the British MW's Rights of Woman, a work devoted to the topic of female education and widely discussed in those terms on both sides of the Atlantic. For one, the British MW mentioned the husband of the American MW by name twice in the Rights of Woman, upholding the first President of the United States, George Washington, as a Fabricius-like, modern Roman statesman and virtuous model of 'modest' (neither arrogant nor humble) leadership in the American Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States.