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Wollstonecraft's life was more contradictory than her theory. After a failed relationship with an American she had met in Paris during the revolution and by whom she had an illegitimate daughter, she became pregnant by the anarchist William Godwin and insisted on marrying him. Tragically, she died soon after giving birth to her second daughter Mary. She would grow up to write the politically challenging novel Frankenstein and to marry the Romantic and radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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There were double standards on slavery, too. In 1750, while fortunes were being made out of the horrific transport and sale of human beings from Africa to the New World, William Pitt the Elder, who was later to become prime minister, said: 'The liberty of the subject, Sir, is so deeply rooted in our constitution that no slavery ... can be admitted ... The black slaves of our plantations become free as soon as they set foot upon this once happy island.'
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