Margaret King

Margaret King (1773–1835), also known as Margaret King Moore, Lady Mount Cashell and Mrs Mason, was an Anglo-Irish hostess, and a writer of female-emancipatory fiction and health advice. Despite her wealthy aristocratic background, she had republican sympathies and advanced views on education and women's rights, shaped in part by having been a favoured pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. Settling in Italy in later life, she reciprocated her governess's care by offering maternal aid and advice to Wollstonecraft's daughter Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) and her travelling companions, husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and stepsister Claire Clairmont. In Pisa, she continued the study of medicine which she had begun in Germany (possibly cross-dressing for the purpose, as universities were restricted to men) and published her widely read Advice to Young Mothers, as well as a novel, The Sisters of Nansfield: A Tale for Young Women. Childhood Margaret King was born into the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family, leading members of the Protestant Ascendancy, the Anglican landed elite in Ireland who cooperated with the British Crown in governing the Kingdom. Her mother, Caroline Fitzgerald (one of the wealthiest heiresses in Ireland and first cousin of the revolutionary Lord Edward FitzGerald), was married off at 15 to Robert King, Viscount Kingsborough, later Earl of Kingston. The family seat was Mitchelstown Castle, in the north County Cork town of Mitchelstown. Margaret was the middle child among a family of nine siblings. Tutored by Mary Wollstonecraft Her parents, she later wrote, were "too much occupied by frivolous amusements to pay much attention to their children", so already before her third birthday, she was entrusted to governesses and tutors. These included the pioneer educator and proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, to whom Margaret was a "most devoted protegee".