Four years before she ignited the dawn of feminism with her epoch-making 1792 book Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the pioneering British philosopher and political theorist Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759–September 10, 1797) set out to change the fabric of society at the loom: She decided to write a children’s book of allegorical stories inviting young readers to contemplate questions of moral philosophy. At the heart of her vision was an insistence on the value of girls’ education as a counterpoint and challenge to Rousseau’s seminal 1762 book Émile, or Treatise on Education, which focused on the education of boys and reflected the era’s dominant ethos that women are to be educated only in order to make desirable wives and good conversation companions for their husbands.

The result was Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (public library | free ebook), composed when Wollstonecraft was twenty-nine — six years before the birth of her own first child, Fanny, and nine years before that of her second, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.

Two centuries before beloved Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White declaimed that “anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time” and that they are instead to be written up to, for they are “the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth,” Wollstonecraft wrote with the conviction that children ought not be shielded from life’s most demanding and difficult questions — mortality, kindness and cruelty, the meaning of mercy, the eternal interplay of good and evil. She outlined her aim and her means in the preface:

Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason… Reason, with difficulty, conquers settled habits, even when it is arrived at some degree of maturity: why then do we suffer children to be bound with fetters, which their half-formed faculties cannot break.

In writing the following work, I aim at perspicuity and simplicity of style; and try to avoid those unmeaning compliments, which slip from the tongue, but have not the least connexion with the affections that should warm the heart, and animate the conduct. By this false politeness, sincerity is sacrificed, and truth violated; and thus artificial manners are necessarily taught. For true politeness is a polish, not a varnish; and should rather be acquired by observation than admonition… The way to render instruction most useful cannot always be adopted; knowledge should be gradually imparted, and flow more from example than teaching: example directly addresses the senses, the first inlets to the heart; and the improvement of those instruments of the understanding is the object education should have constantly in view, and over which we have most power.

Three years after the publication of the book, just as Wollstonecraft was finalizing Vindication, her publisher began preparing a second edition of Original Stories from Real Life and commissioned William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) to illustrate it. Only a year earlier, Blake had finished printing and illuminating the first few copies of his now-legendary Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Two songs in it — “The Little Boy Lost” and “The Little Boy Found” — were inspired by Wollstonecraft’s translation of C.G. Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for which Blake had done several engravings.

Blake reworked his preliminary drawings for Original Stories, ten of which survive, into the etchings that appear on the six illustrated plates in the book.

Six years later, Wollstonecraft died of complications from childbirth after bringing future Frankenstein author Mary Shelley into the world. Influenced by her work and moved by the tragedy of her personal story, Blake commemorated her in an engraving:

Complement with Esperanza Spalding’s stunning soul-jazz performance of Blake’s poem “The Fly,” his illustrations for Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divine Comedy, and his most beautiful letter — a spirited defense of the imagination and the creative spirit — then revisit Maurice Sendak’s formative etchings for Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Mary Wollstonecraft on the courage of unwavering affection.