The authors of _Modern Woman_ have done an excellent job of analyzing the unhappy home environment and early experiences that made Wollstonecraft a champion of her sex and a mordant critic of male dominance. They pass over, as not germane to their theme, one major factor in her life, her consuming attachment to Fanny Blood, a young woman slightly Mary’s senior, which began when the latter was about fifteen and continued until Fanny’s death twelve years later. Of this attachment William Godwin in his _Memoirs_ says that it was “so fervent as ... to have constituted the ruling passion in her mind.”[9] This friendship is the theme of _Mary_, though the fictional version is less moving and significant than the known facts on which it was based. As biographers and critics are agreed that Wollstonecraft had little creative imagination and drew for all her fiction with almost embarrassing literalness upon her own experience, a parallel analysis of the tale and its source incidents will be enlightening. The fictional “Mary” is the child of wealth, with a single brother and an ailing mother sentimentally addicted to novel reading. In reality, Mary was the second of six children of a violent drunken father and a masochistically submissive mother. The family was so impoverished that from childhood Mary was acquainted with the bitterest contriving, and in late adolescence faced earning her own living, a problem not easily solved in her time for a woman above the servant class. The father in the novel, dangerous when in his cups and given freely to wenching, is the only accurate family portrait aside from the heroine herself. That “tenderness and compassion” for the ill-treated mother became “the governing propensity in her heart through life” was as true of the real as of the fictional Mary. As a mere child Wollstonecraft had often slept on the landing outside her mother’s door so that her father should not misuse his wife when drunk. Ann, the beloved friend in the novel, lives, as did Fanny Blood, in wretched poverty and suffers from unrequited love for a man who has trifled with her affections. Thus “Mary’s” passionate devotion to Ann is not returned in kind, and she is “often hurt by involuntary indifference.” Rushing to Ann with glowing delight and seeing no answering emotion in her friend’s face, “Mary would check her warm greeting and seem of chilling insensibility.” Then, perceiving her friend’s hurt surprise, she forces a contrite and disciplined warmth.