 Wollstonecraft has what scholar Cora Kaplan labelled in 2002 a " curious " legacy that has evolved over time : " for an author @-@ activist adept in many genres ... up until the last quarter @-@ century Wollstonecraft 's life has been read much more closely than her writing " . After the devastating effect of Godwin 's Memoirs , Wollstonecraft 's reputation lay in tatters for a century ; she was pilloried by such writers as Maria Edgeworth , who patterned the " freakish " Harriet Freke in Belinda ( 1801 ) after her . Other novelists such as Mary Hays , Charlotte Turner Smith , Fanny Burney , and Jane West created similar figures , all to teach a " moral lesson " to their readers . ( Hays had been a close friend , and helped nurse her in her dying days . ) Scholar Virginia Sapiro states that few read Wollstonecraft 's works during the nineteenth century as " her attackers implied or stated that no self @-@ respecting woman would read her work " . ( In fact , as Craciun points out , new editions of Rights of Woman appeared in the UK in the 1840s , and in the US in the 1830s , 1840s , and 1850s . ) One of those few was Elizabeth Barrett Browning , who read Rights of Woman at the age of 12 , and whose poem Aurora Leigh reflected " Wollstonecraft 's unwavering focus on education " . Lucretia Mott , a Quaker minister , and Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Americans who met at the World Anti @-@ Slavery Convention in London , discovered they had both read Wollstonecraft , and agreed the need for what became the Seneca Falls Convention , an influential women 's rights meeting held in 1848 . Another who read Wollstonecraft was George Eliot , a prolific writer of reviews , articles , novels , and translations . In 1855 , she devoted an essay to the roles and rights of women , comparing Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller . Fuller was an American journalist , critic , and women 's right activist who , like Wollstonecraft , had travelled to the Continent , been involved in the struggle for reform ( in this case the Roman Republic ) , and had a child by a man without marrying him . Wollstonecraft 's children 's work was adapted by Charlotte Mary Yonge in 1870 . 
