Queer Places:
Mary Wollstonecraft School, Matthias Rd, Mayville Estate, London N16 8NP, Regno Unito
Frances "Fanny" Blood (1758 - November 29, 1785) was an English illustrator and educator and longtime friend of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Frances "Fanny" Blood was born in 1758, the daughter of Matthew Blood II (1730-1794) and Caroline Roe (c.1730-1805).[1]
Fanny Blood was paid by the botanist William Curtis to paint wild flowers for his book Flora Londinensis. This created an income for her family. Fanny was engaged to Hugh Skeys but her fiance had gone to sea to establish money that would finance their marriage.[2]
Fanny Blood and her brother Lieutenant George Blood (1762-1844) were good friends with Mary Wollstonecraft. They met in 1774 after introductions by common friends, the Clares.[2] As William Godwin wrote, Mary "contracted a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind".[3]
Blood, together with Mary Wollstonecraft and Wollstonecraft's sisters, Eliza and Everina, opened a school first in Islington, which soon failed, and then in Newington Green. The school was combined with a boarding-house for women and their children.[4] On February 24, 1785, Fanny Blood married Hugh Skeys (born ca. 1758), a wine merchant of Dublin. When Blood married and left the school, Wollstonecraft left as well to take care of her friend, and also the second school failed.[5]
Blood died in childbirth in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 29, 1785.[1] Wollstonecraft was deeply affected by Blood's death and in part inspired her first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788).[6] Wollstonecraft named her daughter, Fanny Imlay (1794-1816), after her friend.
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