This Dublin Block Tells The Story Of The City nytimes.com

IN 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft, later to become the mother of the writer Mary Shelley — and therefore, in a way, the grandmother of Frankenstein — moved to 15 Henrietta Street, Dublin. She was 28 and had been hired as a governess to the aristocratic family of Lord Kingsborough. It wasn’t a job she particularly wanted — she had already established her own school in London and had written a book about the education of girls — but times were hard, and she needed to support herself.

The “wild Irish” Kingsborough daughters were “unformed and not very pleasing,” Wollstonecraft said in a letter home, but there was some mitigation in the house itself. “I have much more convenient apartments here,” she wrote. “A fine schoolroom — the use of one of the drawing rooms where the harpsichord is — and a parlor to receive my male visitors in.”