 That reason must rule supreme could easily appear to be a running theme of Wollstonecraft’s works written prior to her sojourn in Revolutionary France and, all the more, prior to her travels through Scandinavia. It is stressed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Other continuities between her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and the Vindication include her insistence that girls and young women be made to acquire ‘inner resources’ so as to make them as psychologically independent as possible. The Thoughts also reveals Wollstonecraft’s conviction that universal benevolence is the first virtue, as well as her faith in a providentially ordained universe. She enjoined her readers to prepare their children for ‘the main business of our lives’, that is, the acquisition of virtue, and, unsurprisingly given her own history, she urged parents to strengthen their children’s characters so as to enhance their capacity to survive personal tragedies. Self-mastery was thus the aim of education and it was the duty of parents to ensure that their children received it.  However, she insisted that there was a time for everything, including for the development of each of the mind’s faculties, not least the imagination.  Ultimately, she wanted children and young people to educated in such a way as to have well balanced minds in strong and healthy bodies. That mind and body needed to be exercised and prepared to face the inevitable hardships of life is the fundamental point of her of her pedagogical works (Tomaselli 2020).