character of Harriet Freke. But, like Jane Austen, she does not reject Wollstonecraft's ideas. Both Edgeworth and Austen argue that women are crucial to the development of the nation; moreover, they portray women as rational beings who should choose companionate marriage. The negative views towards Wollstonecraft persisted for over a century. The Rights of Woman was not reprinted until the middle of the nineteenth century and it still retained an aura of ill-repute. George Eliot wrote "there is in some quarters a vague prejudice against the Rights of Woman as in some way or other a reprehensible book, but readers who go to it with this impression will be surprised to find it eminently serious, severely moral, and withal rather heavy". The suffragist (i.e. moderate reformer, as opposed to suffragette) Millicent Garrett Fawcett wrote the introduction to the centenary edition of the Rights of Woman, cleansing the memory of Wollstonecraft and claiming her as the foremother of the struggle for the vote. While the Rights of Woman may have paved the way for feminist arguments, twentieth-century feminists have tended to use Wollstonecraft's life story, rather than her texts, for inspiration; her unorthodox lifestyle convinced them to try new "experiments in living", as Virginia Woolf termed it in her famous essay on Wollstonecraft. However, there is some evidence that the Rights of Woman may be influencing current feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a feminist who is critical of Islam's dictates regarding women, cites the Rights of Woman in her autobiography Infidel, writing that she was "inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist thinker who told women they had the same ability to reason as men did and deserved the same rights". Miriam Schneir also includes this text in her anthology Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, labelling it as one of the essential feminist works. Further evidence of the enduring legacy of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication may be seen by direct references in recent historical fiction set: for example, in The Silk Weaver (1998) set in the late eighteenth century among Dublin silk weavers, author Gabrielle Warnock (1998) intervenes as narrator to hold up ‘Rights of Woman’ for the reader to reflect upon the politics, morals, and feelings of her female characters. In Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), set in 1803, P. D. James has one male character reference Rights of Woman in reproving another (Darcy) for denying voice to the woman in matters