Mary / The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Īfter sending acquaintance George Dyson the manuscript for feedback, Wollstonecraft wrote to him, saying, “I am vexed and surprised at your not thinking the situation of Maria sufficiently important.” Wollstonecraft attributed this lack of “delicacy of feeling” to the fact that Dyson was a man. She wrote many parts of the work again and again, and, when she had finished what she intended for the first part, she felt herself more urgently stimulated to revise and improve what she had written, than to proceed, with constancy of application, in the parts that were to follow. She began it in several forms, which she successively rejected, after they were considerably advanced. But this was written slowly and with mature consideration. All her other works were produced with a rapidity, that did not give her powers time fully to expand. She was sensible how arduous a task it is to produce a truly excellent novel and she roused her faculties to grapple with it. By the time she began The Wrongs of Woman however, she had a small daughter and perhaps a larger experience of womanhood. Wollstonecraft struggled to write The Wrongs of Woman for over a year in contrast, she had dashed off A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), her reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in under a month and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) in six weeks. 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 autobiographical. Twentieth-century feminist critics embraced the work, integrating it into the history of the novel and feminist discourse. 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. The novel pioneered the celebration of female sexuality and cross-class identification between women. However, the heroine's inability to relinquish her romantic fantasies also reveals women's collusion in their oppression through false and damaging sentimentalism. 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. Wollstonecraft's philosophical and gothic novel revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband. The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798 by her husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her most radical feminist work. Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Mary / The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft