Sion Hill, Bristol

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her only novel Mary (1787) whilst working as a governess for the Kingsborough family, who were staying in the spa resort before embarking on a European tour. In 1787, she also met Johnson overlooking the Avon Gorge. Her relationships with the family provided material for the novel, a work that Wollstonecraft herself admitted was ‘drawn from Nature’. Eliza, for example, is partially based on Lady Kingsborough, who Wollstonecraft believed cared more for her dogs than for her children. More importantly, the friendship between Mary and Ann closely resembles the relationship between Wollstonecraft and her intimate companion Fanny Blood, who meant ‘all the world’ to her and, as Wollstonecraft’s husband William Godwin later put it, ‘for whom she contracted a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind’. Wollstonecraft’s representation of Fanny as Ann has been called ‘condescending’; critics have speculated that because Wollstonecraft felt betrayed by Fanny’s decision to marry, she depicted Ann as a friend who could never satisfy the heroine. Wollstonecraft also started her next novel (unfinished) The Cave of Fancy in Bristol. She was then dismissed by Lord and Lady Kingsborough and moved to London.