 Wollstonecraft left for Paris in December 1792 and arrived about a month before Louis XVI was guillotined . France was in turmoil . She sought out other British visitors such as Helen Maria Williams and joined the circle of expatriates then in the city . Having just written the Rights of Woman , Wollstonecraft was determined to put her ideas to the test , and in the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the French revolution she attempted her most experimental romantic attachment yet : she met and fell passionately in love with Gilbert Imlay , an American adventurer . Whether or not she was interested in marriage , he was not , and she appears to have fallen in love with an idealized portrait of the man . While Wollstonecraft had rejected the sexual component of relationships in the Rights of Woman , Imlay awakened her passions and her interest in sex . She soon became pregnant , and on 14 May 1794 she gave birth to her first child , Fanny , naming her after perhaps her closest friend . Wollstonecraft was overjoyed ; she wrote to a friend : " My little Girl begins to suck so MANFULLY that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R [ igh ] ts of Woman " ( emphasis hers ) . She continued to write avidly , despite not only her pregnancy and the burdens of being a new mother alone in a foreign country , but also the growing tumult of the French Revolution . While at Le Havre in northern France , she wrote a history of the early revolution , An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution , which was published in London in December 1794 . 
