Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman
This is Mary
Wollstonecraft's unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798 by her husband, William
Godwin, and is often considered her
most radical feminist work.
Wollstonecraft's philosophical and gothic novel revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by
her husband. It focuses on the societal rather than the individual "wrongs
of woman" and criticizes what Wollstonecraft viewed as the patriarchal institution of marriage in eighteenth-century Britain and the legal
system that protected it. However, the heroine's inability to relinquish her
romantic fantasies also indicts women for wallowing in a false and damaging sentimentalism. The novel pioneered the celebration of female sexuality and
cross-class identification between women. Such themes, coupled with the
publication of Godwin's scandalous Memoirs of Wollstonecraft's life, made the novel unpopular at the time it was
published.
Twentieth-century feminist critics embraced
the work, integrating it into the history of the novel and feminist discourse.
It is most often viewed as a fictionalized popularization of the Rights of
Woman, as an extension of Wollstonecraft's feminist arguments in Rights
of Woman, and as an autobiography.
URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria:_or,_The_Wrongs_of_Woman