Note 234 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

And in the closing years of the century there arose a new promise of higher life in the apparition of Mary Wollstonecraft, ill-starred but noble, whose Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) show her to have been a freethinking deist of remarkable original faculty,234 and whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the first great plea for the emancipation of her sex.