That was the reaction of local shoppers when I asked them about Mary Wollstonecraft, whose remains lay less than 100 yards from them, as they shopped in Gervis Place.

You could forgive the blokes, but women?

Come on ladies. If you’ve been to school or got a degree, it’s Mary you ought to be thanking.

Mary did a lot of things but her greatest achievement was publishing her book: A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. Mary argued not only that women should have an education commensurate with their position in society, but that this position should be elevated from that of passive skivvy, which most low-born women held.

Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Mary argued that they are human beings, deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.

She was worried that her contemporaries, women she described as ‘spaniels’ and ‘toys’ had only got that way because men had denied them a proper education.

She was worried about women being judged on their looks, seeing the trouble it could lead to. “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison,” she stated.

Mary thought that if women were discouraged from focussing on their looks all the time, they might achieve a lot more.

And if you thought these were the views of a dried-up spinster or bearded man-hater then think again.

Because Mary had a private life that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Jackie Collins novel.

She walked the feminist talk.

After a turbulent London childhood in which her family lost its money and her violent father became so dangerous that Mary took to sleeping outside her mother’s door to try and protect her from his rages, Mary ran off to become a lady’s companion. She tried living alone with a friend and then fell in love, with the artist Henry Fuseli.

Fuseli was married but that didn’t bother Mary.

She suggested a platonic living arrangement for the three of them which so angered his wife that Fuseli broke off the relationship with Mary.

She then travelled to revolutionary France, arriving one month before Louis XVI was guillotined. Mary then fell in love with an American, Gilbert Imlay.

By this time she had published two books and became a mother. Imlay eventually abandoned her and after a couple of suicide attempts, Mary returned to England and fell in love with the philosopher William Godwin.

Although she had never been married to Imlay – scandalous at the time – and although Godwin didn’t actually believe in marriage and had advocated its abolition in his book, Political Justice, they decided to tie the knot as Mary was expecting their child.

After their marriage they moved into adjoining houses, communicating by letter until poor Mary died of septicaemia as a result of the birth of their daughter, another Mary, who was eventually to marry poet Percy Shelley and pen the gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Mary Wollstonecraft was first buried in the old St Pancras churchyard in north London.

It was said to be at her grave that her daughter declared her love for Percy Bysshe Shelley but her remains and those of her husband were moved to St Peter’s in Bournemouth in 1851, after Mary Shelley moved to the town.

As the post office wasn’t invented when she was alive, it’s hard to know what she’d have made of being on a stamp.

But one thing’s for sure – we should ALL hail Mary.

Including the blokes.

Because she not only wrote a book vindicating the rights of women, she also wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men!