 Wollstonecraft’s Vindication was the first of many replies. Amongst those that followed was one by Catharine Macaulay, who had influenced Wollstonecraft’s pedagogy and was much admired by her (Gunther-Canada 1998; Coffee, 2019). Wollstonecraft’s riposte is an interesting and rhetorically powerful work in its own right as well as a necessary introduction to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It consists mostly of a sustained attack on Burke rather than a defence of the rights of man. This is partly because Wollstonecraft took for granted a Lockean conception of God-given rights discoverable by reason, except when the latter was warped by self-love. Wollstonecraft further believed that God made all things right and that the cause of all evil was man. In her view, Burke’s Reflections showed its author to be blind to man-made poverty and injustice; this she attributed to his infatuation with rank, Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the English Constitution. Demonstrating her familiarity with Burke’s other works and speeches, especially A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and the Speech on Conciliation with America (1775), she also argued that he was inconsistent, if only because of the impossibility, as she saw it, of reconciling his sympathy for the American cause with his reaction to events in France. In this, Wollstonecraft was far from alone and many who had followed Burke’s parliamentary career and heard his Speeches to the House of Commons were astonished by what they thought was a radical and inexplicable change of position.