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recklessly cutting the golden chain that tied one generation to the next, the past to the future. They imagined they could, like Lafayette, ride the tiger of the mobs to power and glory. But they would be the first to be devoured.
    Burke’s
Reflections
was, by the standards of the day, a commercial success as well as a polemical
tour de force
, selling 17,000 in the first three months (at a time when a generous print run for a novel would be about 1500 copies). It was seen by some of the radical Whigs as an act of apostasy from someone who had the reputation (not quite accurate) of having been a friend to the Americans. (Burke had, in fact, sought Anglo-American reconciliation, but once the conflict began was a British loyalist.) But what distressed Price (who died in 1791, his voice hopelessly drowned out by the thunder of Burke’s rhetoric) was its parochialism: the insistence that the British political inheritance
was
unique; that at their birth Britons had received not ‘natural rights’ but a distinctly native inheritance, quite irreconcilable with universally applicable liberties. Nature, Burke seemed to be saying, could never be cosmopolitan.
    In the humiliation of Marie Antoinette fleeing ‘almost naked … to seek refuge at the feet of [the] king’ Burke had seen and lamented the death of chivalry in France. Reverse chivalry – when a woman might spring to the defence of a violently abused man – would never have occurred to him. Such an occurrence he would certainly have characterized as ‘unnatural’. But that is precisely what did happen. Barely a month after the appearance of Burke’s
Reflections
, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had met Price when she opened a school in Newington Green, a stone’s throw from his chapel, published her counter-attack,
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790). She had obviously been stung to see Price the subject of Burke’s withering scorn. He had been her first real mentor when she had returned to London from Yorkshire, a self-taught bluestocking nobody, and had encouraged and befriended her as he had many other women writers, such as the children’s author (also a radical) Anna Letitia Barbauld.
    Mary had needed all the help she could get, for she had led a gypsy life, constantly fretting about her siblings and never earning quite enough money from her reviews and essays. Her father, the son of a Spitalfields silk weaver, had tried a bit of this and a bit of that – farming in Essex, provincial swagger in Yorkshire – and had failed at each venture. Mary had perforce been mother hen to her sisters, even when one of them walked out on her husband for reasons unexplained but easily guessed. She had, of course, soaked herself in the tepid pool of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sentimental education and had got all warm and sticky with dreams of emotional purity and immortal friendship. But one of Rousseau’s truisms about nature – the nature of the sexes – struck her as monstrous. It was the philosopher’s assumption, set out in his novel,
Emile
, that girls had to be raised for one supreme purpose – to be a comfort and helpmate to their spouse and the mother (a nursing mother, naturally) to his children. Providence had ordained the sexes to be so unbridgeably different that any women who got it into their heads to be like, to act like, men were by definition biological and moral monsters, robbing their families of the quality that made an abode a home,
tendresse
.
    Mary had seen her own mother’s sad attempts to lavish such tenderness on her prodigal, drunken husband, and she thought it over-rated. Partly inspired by the example of the growing number of women who seemed to live from their pen, she wrote a little treatise on the education of daughters, arguing, in spite of
Emile
, that girls had the potential to be every bit as educated as boys. And she sent it to the man who seemed to be the hub of all the free spirits and radical writers in London, perhaps in