Margaret King

Margaret King (1773–1835) was an Irish hostess, writer, traveller, and medical adviser. Despite her wealthy aristocratic background, she had republican sympathies, shaped in part by having been a favoured pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. 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.

Margaret King was born to the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family, leading members of the Protestant Ascendancy. 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, second Earl of Kingston. The family seat was Mitchelstown Castle, in the north County Cork town of Mitchelstown.

As a young teenager, Margaret's life was touched by the pioneer educator and proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, to whom she was a "most devoted protegee". This appointment as her governess did not last more than a year, as Wollstonecraft could not get along with Lady Kingsborough. The children found her an inspiring instructor; Margaret King would later say she "had freed her mind from all superstitions". Some of Wollstonecraft's experiences during this year would make their way into her only children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788). The maternal teacher who frames these stories is called Mrs Mason, a name Margaret King adopted in later life.

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