The Woman Who Refused to Sink (Wollstonecraft’s Leap)

Before Mary Wollstonecraft became the mother of feminism and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was a woman in love with a scoundrel.
In 1795, she was heartbroken. Her lover, the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, had cheated on her, ghosted her, and left her alone with an illegitimate child in the middle of revolutionary Europe.
She decided she was done. She wrote a note: “Let my wrongs sleep with me.” She walked to Putney Bridge in London. It was pouring rain. She walked up and down the bridge for thirty minutes, deliberately soaking her heavy Victorian skirts so the weight would drag her down faster.
She jumped.
But the universe wasn’t done with Mary Wollstonecraft. Her skirts, instead of acting like an anchor, ballooned out in the water. She floated. She drifted unconscious down the Thames until a group of boatmen saw her, fished her out with hooks, and revived her—much to her fury.
She had tried to exit a world that didn’t want her, and the world spat her back out. She woke up, realised she was still alive, and decided that if she couldn’t die, she was going to make sure the world heard her complain about it. She picked up her pen and wrote the philosophy that would change history.
She was the original survivor. Meet the women who built Romanticism this Wednesday.

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