Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman

by Mary Wollstonecraft

In Maria , Wollstonecraft pursues in fictional form themes set forth in 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.' Her story of a woman incarcerated in a madhouse by her abusive husband dramatizes the effect of the English marriage laws, which made women virtually the property of their husbands.

Genres: Classics, Feminism, Fiction, Philosophy, School, 18th Century, Gothic

138 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1788

About the author

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. Among the general public and specifically among feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has received much more attention than her writing because of her unconventional, and often tumultuous, personal relationships. After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement; they had one daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight due to complications from childbirth, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts.

During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.


After Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.

Information courtesy of Wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Caz (littlebookowl) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars
This was quite a radical feminist text!
Since the author died before the completion of this work, it's hard to give it a higher rating, but I did quite enjoy what I read.

[Leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've seen a few reviews saying this was an unfinished work of Mary Wollstonecraft and I can totally see that, but it was an very intriguing read nevertheless

[Rabbit {Paint me like one of your 19th century gothic heroines!} · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was another powerful read for me. I think this should be essential fiction read for feminists. Truly ground breaking stuff for the time period it was written in.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Name me a white man whose authorial repute and chain of influence was sunken for a century or more not out of obscurity or lack of opportunity, but reputation. They said some things, they slept around, they did one or the other or all the actions prescribed as social ills by some and declared as damnation by the voices that count. Come. Just one. Considering the rate at which famous names of that demographic are revealed to be murderers and rapists and pedophiles, it can't be hard to find just one whose followers had to read in secret and leave a breadcrumb trail constitued only of traits of characters and arc of plot. Sade? Malory? The case for Jefferson composes itself, but no one wants to touch on that.

Wollstonecraft was far more concerned with shaping her words to match her thoughts and feelings than the other way around. Couple that with a life cut short by a royal physician reaching up inside her and ripping out the belated placenta (That one's for you, 18th century romanticizers. Hygiene? Gloves? Ha) and you get something that needs a great deal of work. However, the manner in which 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' and 'The Yellow-Wallpaper' still astonish today attests more than anything to the sheer power of the plot, for if the author of at least the first didn't read Maria I'll eat my hat. Some may remark on the plot's uniqueness, but the only reason for that is the simple matter of writers not wanting to get their hands dirty. Domestic abuse, legal trials, and madhouse flights done not for the sake of sensationalist exposées, but the fervent hope that the reading here will inspire the triumph there? That certainly will not sell. It will, however, lay the groundwork for the Helen Graham and so many others of her kind, lines of inheritance that will never, ever, be buried deeply enough to forever ward off escape.

I read this and Wollstonecraft's Vindication in preparation for reading the near entirety of Jane Austen's bibliography. What the first fiction lacks in polishing it makes up for in self-reflexivity, eyeing the class divisions and similar yet dissimilar trouble of women in such a way that it kills me to think on what could have been achieved with a mere two or three decades tacked on the author's life. A stiffling of Godwin's dire buffonery when it came to publishing, for one. A less sunken treasure feeling when it comes to the idea of finding Wollstonecraft in Austen, for another. The latter's seemingly all nice and cute, but we all know what it takes for women to avoid the blotting out of infamy.

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 3 out of 5]

2018 Reading Challenge: related to feminism

I'm so proud of myself for choosing to not depend on a man

[Sadie Hartmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story begins in the middle so it does take a minute for readers to find their bearings. We learn that Maria has been sent to an asylum (imprisoned) never to see her child again. She befriends her attendant, Jemima, who cares for Maria--nurturing her, convincing her to eat and go on living despite her current situation.
They become friends, Jemima tells Maria her life story which is absolutely horrific and sad. I think the author uses Jemima's tale to show Maria that while her situation is bad, it can always be worse. As the story goes on, we learn Maria's backstory, her husband's abhorrent behavior, how she got pregnant, and ultimately her escape from him. He eventually finds her and has her committed but that's where this ends--Mary Wollstonecraft didn't finish the story. Her husband published it after her death.
Even though the story is incomplete and less than 100 pages, it was challenging to read. I can't say that I was invested in the story the same way I get invested in modern storytelling, but I am glad I read it. There's something to be said about reading feminist gothic lit from the 1700s--it feels important/historical.

[anouk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[...] and he, still the master of his own fate, enjoys the smiles of a world, that would brand her with infamy, did she, seeking consolation, venture to retaliate."

Oh, dear Mary Wollstonecraft. Such a brilliant mind. So ahead of her time. It's a shame she never got to finish this book.

[Diana Lorena SRP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Resulta supremamente extraño leer a una autora del siglo XVIII; aunque sólo 25 años separan a esta novela de “Orgullo y Prejuicio”, y tan solo 7 de cuando Austen empezó a escribir “Sentido y Sensibilidad”, se siente una enorme diferencia.
Decía hace unos días que leer clásicos me genera un gran aprendizaje tanto a nivel de lectura como de escritura, y leer a la que es considerada la primera feminista no podría ser diferente, pero la sensación que me deja este libro aún no logro definirla. Quizás para cuando escriba la reseña en Instagram tenga las cosas más claras y pueda actualizar estos comentarios.
Hay algo en el narrador que no me permitió conectar con la historia; aunque la protagonista me dio un montón de frases y momentos en los que me sentí identificada, siento que no logro empatizar con Mary, porque no logré conocerla bien, a pesar que se nos describe muy específicamente su forma de ser, actitudes y actividades.
Entiendo que una “mujer que piensa” era algo revolucionario en 1788, pero en realidad no creo que Mary pensara como tal.
Pero es porque la analizo desde la perspectiva de mi época y comparándola con un montón de heroínas que llegaron después de ella.
Creo sin duda que debo revisar el montón de post-Its que coloqué y llevar este libro en mi cabeza unos días más.

[Marta Cava]

A través d'una ficció, l'autora ens mostra el dolor d'una dona atrapada per un home i un matrimoni. Una història del segle XVIII que malauradament mostra coses que encara passen al segle XXI

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I find super frustrating about this novel's rating on GR is that people are incredibly eager to shriek, "FEMINIST PROPAGANDA," when they see "Woman" in the title and open the book to find stories about working-class women being abused by men.

"All men are villains in this novel!" you cry.

...

And?

Oh, that's the critique? You realize this is 1700s England, right? Abuse at the hands of men is naturally going to be rampant, especially considering that one of our main characters---whose story takes up maybe 10% of the novel---is a working class woman unwillingly forced into prostitution. So yeah. We're going to run into villainous men.

But also, not all the men in this novel are villains. There are approximately three "good" characters in this novel (excluding Maria's child), and they are Maria herself, Jemima, and---drum roll please---Maria's uncle. He attempts to protect Maria from her terrible birth family and, later, from her husband, but he has no legal claim over Maria, is unaware of the financial abuse she's suffering at the hands of her husband, and (because he's old and ailing) he can't really make it to her in time when she needs him the most. None of these are attributed to the fault of the uncle. He is a genuinely good man who instilled in Maria a sense of virtue that escapes the social concept of feminine virtue.

So the claim that this novel is essentially saying "All men are evil" is just provably wrong.

You also may have noticed that the list above (of "good" characters) is incredibly short. And that's because there are plenty of truly despicable women in the plot. In fact, women drive a lot of the most horrible things to happen to other women; the abuse they suffer at the hands of men puts these women in scenarios where they have either a) convinced themselves that the patriarchy's conception of womanhood is true, or b) viciously destroy other women's social standings to protect their own tenuous situation. This is not a "men bad, women good" kind of novel.

And god damn, if I see one more review saying, "This is a political treatise disguised as a novel," I will eat a shoe. You're correct in some respects---it does have very explicit political motivations---but since when is naming what a novel tantamount to a critique of the novel? You have to follow through, here. Why is it bad that this novel has very overt political sensibilities?

Anger.

Anyway. Is this to say that the book is perfect? No god dammit; it's not even finished. It's often long-winded and like to exposit at you in a series of letters or conversations narrating the character's life story. But it does not deserve the flack it's getting on account of its ideology.

3.5/5 stars

[Rachel Brand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for EN4363: Romantic Writing and Women.

Although it looks like this book took me a fortnight to read, in reality I probably could have read it in half a day. I just wasn't terribly inspired to read yet another depressing novel about the state of women in late eighteenth century Britain. And on top of that, Mary Wollstonecraft isn't a great fiction-writer. Fantastic as her Vindication of the Rights of Woman is, her talent doesn't seem to transfer from non-fiction to storytelling. I think the biggest issue is simply that she doesn't set out to tell a story--she sets out to teach readers about how hard life is for women. There's no doubting that this is a noble aspiration, but it doesn't always make for the more interesting or compelling read.

There were parts of this book that grabbed my attention--particularly, Maria's memoirs to her daughter--and perhaps it would have been more engaging if the novel was finished. That's a warning to all potential readers--Maria was unfinished at the time of the author's death, thus any publication of the work is fragmented. That said, I don't know if a finished version of the book would have felt more realistic. I'm not doubting for a second that women were mistreated by their husbands and fathers in this time period, but every single woman in this book--even those who only appeared for five pages--stopped to tell Maria her sad story. This book was like one giant tangent! I know that stories within stories and tangents were typical of writing in this period, but this novel really takes it to the extreme.

I'm giving Wollstonecraft credit because her desires of what she could achieve with this book were noble, and she probably reached an audience who wouldn't have thought of reading a non-fiction treatise on the wrongs of women. Her writing is improved from her first novel, Mary, and this was definitely more of a compelling read. But it is ultimately just a treatise wrapped up in the guise of a novel, and for that reason I'm rating this book 2.5*

Edited to add: Here's a quote from Claudia L. Johnson that I came across while researching for my essay on Maria (yes, I may not have particularly liked this book but there's certainly a lot to discuss about it):

"Wollstonecraft's novels may not be masterpieces in the old-fashioned, traditional sense. They are brave attempts, not polished performances."

I think this pretty much sums up how I feel about Maria, and maybe Mary as well.

[Shauna Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has some very interesting and eyebrow raising content, but the novel lacks fluidity and reads like a fractured melodramatic biography of oppressed women's lives.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wollstonecraft was way ahead of her time with this feminist novel, outlining everything that was wrong with British society in the 1780s and 90s.

[emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

No sabia que la Mary Wollstonecraft havia escrit novel·les! Potser no és tan coneguda perquè està inacabada. En tot cas, una obra meravellosa. Destaquen especialment els moments on diu quelcom que et recorda què és una pensadora del segle XVIII, perquè la lectura es fa malauradament moderna. Sovint s’apropa més al manifest, però aquesta ja era la seva intenció, em sembla. És molt pròpia del romanticisme en la seva escriptura, però molt moderna en les seves idees (salvant les distàncies), i a mi, és clar, això m’encanta. Quin bon descobriment!

[sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

you....you're telling me we don't even really know how it was supposed to end??

[madeline]

read for feminist theory/lit!

[Pau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything about this made me feel sad and enraged and Jemima's story.. it was horrific to read

[Tuva · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for my Gothic and Romantic Fiction module.

Wow.
This book contained some of the toughest yet most realistic depictions of women throughout time. Wollstonecraft repeats on multiple occasions just how poorly women were treated and shines a light on how wrong it is for women to be treated that way.
To me, this book feels like a text that was way ahead of its time, and a lot of the mistreatment is still happening in today's society, which goes to show how little progress we have actually made on that end.
The reason why I'm giving this 3 stars is the fact that it is jumbled and a little clunky to read. I dozed off at some point just because I couldn't follow the dialogue. I do believe Wollstonecraft passed away before completing this, so it does make sense for this piece to have that feeling of being incomplete and jumbled. Also, at that time, there was no realistic end to that tale, and there might not be one now either.

[Debbie is on Storygraph · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the novels she left unfinished after her death. This one is very much in the vein of her other books and I honestly would not have read it if it weren't required for my history of political thought class. I suppose it can be an interesting look at how women were treated during the Enlightenment time period, from the POV of a woman, but it seemed to me to be a long social and political rant disguised as a novel. I do wish she had finished it however, as the manuscript ended just as there was some plot. I can't recommend this to anyone mainly because of its unfinished nature. Possibly Mary, an earlier work of hers? I haven't read it but from what I've heard, all of Wollstonecraft's novels are very similar in plot and characters.

[Rima · Rating 2 out of 5]

She should stick to the day job instead of writing fiction.

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fragment of an unfinished novel reminded me of Rilke's celebrated poem about the "Archaic Torso of Apollo." Even truncated, the full force of the author's just outrage, the suffering and resilience of her dual protagonists, and even the cleverness of the way the plot entwines their dual stories, uniting women, middle class and poor, in all of their tribulations, in a crusade for emancipation of the terrible double standards of marriage laws in late 18th century England. It would probably still have been, in the end, too didactic to stand side-by-side with the greatest novels of the period (to me and my personal aesthetic tastes), yet its reason, its force, and its emotional involvement still stand as a landmark in the realistic novel's leanings into righting the wrongs of society. I enjoyed it very much as is, and am truly sad Wollstonecraft didn't live to finish and publish it, as the text deserved to be more than a postscript or footnote to that tradition. It also shows such a marked improvement on Mary that I'm sad she didn't live to a ripe old age penning better and better novels of outrage and beauty.

[Saige · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wollstonecraft had some fantastic ideas about the rights of women, and I'm eternally grateful to feminists like her who paved the way for me to lead the life that I now lead. I am slightly less grateful to the professor who made me read this book for class. I find didactic novels tiring at the best of times, and it's made worse by constantly flipping between the main text and explanatory notes. 1700's literature is just not my thing. That said, I found Maria a very good protagonist. She isn't some robot of reason - her narration holds love, sorrow, and intellectual purpose all in the same sentences. I liked seeing how she learned not to be meek, and how she spoke her thoughts with such pride and purpose by the end of the book. I wish Wollstonecraft had been able to finish it before her death.

[Hillary Paulino · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having to read a book because I have to read it has almost always guaranteed that I don’t end up enjoying it. Or that I enjoy it a whole lot less than if I’d chosen to read it for leisure. That was the exact case with this book unsurprisingly.

Mary Wollstonecraft was years and years ahead of her time. I appreciated the radical feminist sentiments of this novel knowing that she lived in a time when women were still treated like dainty figurines that had no other purpose than to keep the home and children well. However, I had often had to skim this book as college moves at a fast pace and I have to keep up, hence the language that takes a bit of time to decipher sometimes went over my head. I regret only being able to give it 2 stars but that rating definitely sums up my experience of reading the book for surely had I read this for leisure, it might have had a higher rating.

[Gillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's written for its time, which means I'd rather listen to it than read it. But a wonderful practical expression of a revolutionary feminist and the wonderfully complex mother of another one of my favourite authors. I definitely prefer some endings over others but we'll never know which one she would have gone for.

[Grace Nicol · Rating 5 out of 5]

manifesting this to get me into uni

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars only because it was sadly never finished

[Abigail · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dang. I don’t think I can gather any coherent thoughts on this right now except to say that I’m really sad Mary was never able to complete this novel.

[Chloe · Rating 3 out of 5]

reading ‘maria’, has helped me pinpoint exactly what i don’t like in classics. i cannot focus on the constant stream of consciousness that seems to get more flowery/complex by the word. my mind wanders and it sucks because the concept and message of the book are so interesting.

[Grace Harwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is, as other reviewers have already argued, the very passionate outpourings of a woman who was immensely conscious of the wrongs which were everyday being perpetrated against her sex in the time in which she lived. The story relates the history of Maria who has been shut up in a private madhouse by her husband because he wishes to gain control of her fortune. Stealing her baby ("from her breast") after employing a woman to drug her, Maria wakes up in the gothic confines of the lunatic asylum. Here she befriends, Jemima, her warden, an orphaned child who has ever been exiled from her own kind (much like Wollstonecraft's daughter's work, Frankenstein) due to her fatherless state and Henry Darnford, another inmate who has also been wrongfully incarcerated so that his family can seize his fortune.

The three intertwining histories, when revealed, illustrate quite clearly the wrongs of women living in the 18th Century. Whilst Darnford is permitted freedom to wander as his will and squander his fortune, Maria has her fortune squandered for her by the swindlings of her husband; and Jemima has everything, including her self-respect and virginity stripped from her as she is treated as a piece of property by those with power over her. Imprisoned in the "Bastille" of her marriage, Maria has to fight to free herself from her husband and in effect only manages to escape his bed. Her property is lost to her as the judge who presides over the court case judges it a "fallacy" to permit women to speak for themselves in the matter of their marriages.

This is a wonderful book, although my edition complete with comments randomly inserted by Wollstonecraft's editor (her husband, William Godwin) interfere in the story and project his view into it in a way I didn't enjoy. I have read better editions than the Kindle Complete Works of Wollstonecraft in which I read this story. I love the Gothic elements of the novel and I particularly loved the elements which are almost a prophecy of the future to come - Wollstonecraft's Maria agonises over the birth of her second child "could I have deserted my child the moment it was born?" before proclaiming "the conflict is over! I will live for my child!" Wollstonecraft, of course, died 9 days after the birth of her daughter Mary Shelley leaving her motherless. Indeed, a shelf of books written by her mother, including Maria, would be all Mary Shelley ever knew of her mother, who was unable to live for her child. "Oh my prophetic soul!" as Victor Frankenstein would go on to say in Shelley's own work. Brilliant - you can even compare the fragmentary nature of the story with the ruins of the human soul - gothic literature at its best

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, first of all, this is not a reflection on the politics of the novel. This book is a stark, eye-opening look at the non-existent rights of women in the eighteenth century. After marriage, they were owned by their husbands. Any money they had, any property, was his by rights. The children were his by rights. A husband could divorce his wife for adultery. A wife needed more than that. This novel is a great critique of the time period, written by a woman who lived in it.

That said, I rate books on enjoyment, and this was more of a critique than it was a novel. I always feel like Wollstonecraft uses six hundred words where she could use six. It's a bleak novel, yes, but it's still a novel. It shouldn't read like A Vindication of the Rights of Women . That said, I loved the gothic imagery that surrounded the setting of the asylum.

Between them, Maria and Jemima embody every terrible thing that could happen to a woman in this era. Maria is a sane woman locked up in an asylum because her husband, who she considers herself seperated from, said she was mad. She's recently had a baby daughter, and she has no idea where she is. Jemima was born out of wedlock to a servant. She's treated as a servant by her father and stepmother, denied the love that their other children receive. When she gets a job in a big house, the master rapes her. Pregnant, she's thrown from the house. The master gave her a potion to induce abortion, which she takes, and then, with nowhere to go and no way to get employment, she has no choice but to become a prostitute to survive. By the time she meets Maria she has a job at the asylum, but she's become a cold, hard person. Life made her that way.

This novel was left unfinished when Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to Mary Shelley. There were a number of possible endings. Personally, I like the one where Maria gets her child back. I am always drawn to hope. I would like to think that, despite everything that women went through in the eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft would still have believed in it.