Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London. After an unsettled childhood, she opened a school following which her first work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, was published in 1787. After a stint as a governess in Ireland, she continued to write and published several other works including Mary (1788), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and her most famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). That year she travelled to Paris where she met Gilbert Imlay, by whom she had a daughter, Fanny. Her travels around Scandinavia with her baby daughter in 1795, inspired her travel book Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. On… returning to London Imlay's neglect drove her to two suicide attempts. In 1797 she married William Godwin, and had a daughter, the future Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia shortly after the birth.
Peter Ramos is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and two shorter collections: Watching Late-Night Hitchcock and Other Poems (handwritten press 2004) and Short Waves (White Eagles Coffee Store Press 2003). His criticism has appeared in MELUS, College Literature, The Faulkner Journal, The CEA Critic, Mandorla, Verse, Pleiades, and Poetry Daily. An associate professor of English at Buffalo State, he teaches courses in ninteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.