Mary and The Wrongs of Woman

First published in 1788 and 1798 respectively, Mary: A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria bring together the two novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, offering a revealing portrait of her development as a writer and radical thinker. In Mary, a young woman is forced into a loveless marriage and seeks fulfilment through friendship, feeling and a life of her own choosing. In the unfinished The Wrongs of Woman, written at the end of Wollstonecraft’s life and published posthumously, Maria is imprisoned in an asylum by her husband and separated from her child; through her story, and that of Jemima, a fellow sufferer, Wollstonecraft exposes the legal and social structures that leave women vulnerable to male power.

Together, the novels trace a movement from the language of sensibility towards a more urgent and openly political examination of women’s lives. Love, friendship, marriage, motherhood and personal freedom are explored not as private matters alone, but as questions shaped by law, money and social convention. Less widely read than A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, these works reveal Wollstonecraft’s imaginative range and her use of fiction as a means of social criticism, making this pairing an especially valuable encounter with a writer whose literary achievement extends far beyond her best-known treatise.

From the book

“When her husband would take her hand, or mention any thing like love, she would instantly feel a sickness, a faintness at her heart.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction

On The Wrongs of Woman

“A work touched with originality and passion.”

— Ellen Moers, The New York Review of Books