This literary life aims to give a detailed description of the intellectual, publishing and political communities with which pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was connected during the ten years she was a women of letters in London and Paris. Although she was hailed by contemporary admirers as an original thinker and an intuitive Romantic 'genius', with the hindsight of history it is possible to detect those threads attaching her works to their cultural and material contexts, forming webs of correspondences between writers, which shaped language and literary genres. Wollstonecraft's vocation as a writer sprang from her moral idealism, and influential nonconformist associations afforded her the opportunity to become a professional journalist with the most important publisher of the day, and to participate in the pamphlet war on the French Revolution. These circles and the Girondin salons of republican France fostered her Utopian belief in the power of print to shape public opinion and change the world.