Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is widely recognized as one of the first great feminist writers and thinkers. At the age of nineteen, she took a position as a governess but had to give it up to care for her mother during a protracted, terminal illness. In 1784, she helped her sister escape from a cruel husband. The two sisters, along with a friend, fled to London, where they started a school. Although initially a success, the school ran into financial difficulties and closed. Wollstonecraft wrote her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in 1786. This work was followed in 1788 by a novel, Mary, a Fiction; in 1790 by a book on the French Revolution, A Vindication of the Rights of Men; and in 1792 by Wollstonecraft's masterpiece, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. During the years 1793–94, she went to France to observe the French Revolution firsthand. After adventures and misadventures, she returned to London and married the radical social philosopher William Godwin. The couple's child, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, grew up to write that astonishing Romantic novel Frankenstein. However, Wollstonecraft was not to know her daughter, for she died as a result of childbirth. A memoir written by Godwin after Wollstonecraft's death scandalized the public and led to a suppression of her work. However, twentieth-century women's rights advocates have come to view A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a pioneering work on the necessity of equal education and opportunity for women.