In 1795, at about the age of fifteen, she married Francis Massey Wheeler, of Lizard Connell,[2] heir to an estate at Ballywire, who proposed to her at a ball.

[7] Wheeler's husband died in 1820 and left her penniless, so she supplemented her income by translating into English the works of Charles Fourier and other French Owenite philosophers.

She sometimes spoke at the South Place Chapel, "a radical gathering-place"[9] then under the leadership of the Reverend William Johnson Fox[10] and now better known as Conway Hall.

Unitarians, like Quakers, supported female equality,[11] and this chapel, situated on Finsbury Square in central London,[12] gave her the pulpit to speak on "The Rights of Women".

A staunch advocate of political rights for women and of equal opportunities in education, Wheeler was a friend of the French feminists and socialists Flora Tristan and Desirée Veret.

Her other friends and associates included Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, Suzanne Voilquin (editor of Tribune des femmes), Marie-Reine Guindorf, and Jeanne Deroin.

Wheeler was forced to withdraw from public life in the 1840s due to ill health, and she died on 7 May 1848 in Camden, London, having refused invitations to take part in the revolution in France of that year.

One of Wheeler's great-granddaughters was the sister-in-law of the Prime Minister Gerald Balfour, while another, Lady Constance Lytton, followed Anna's role model and became a leading suffragette protester, hunger striker and writer, and a third, Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton, dismayed her parents by successfully proposing to the architect Edwin Landseer Lutyens and later became a Theosophist.