Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman
1798
Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft's incendiary unfinished novel, published posthumously in 1798. A woman named Maria has been locked in a private madhouse by her husband, separated from her child, her property seized, her sanity questioned simply for resisting his cruelty. Through the Gothic darkness of her confinement, she begins an unlikely friendship with Jemima, her guard, a servant woman who has also been crushed by the machinery of male power. Together, these two women from different classes recognize their shared captivity. But Maria's own fantasies about love prove harder to escape than her physical bars, revealing how women absorb and perpetuate the sentimental lies that keep them subordinate. Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to Mary Shelley, wrote this novel as fiction's answer to her own Rights of Woman: not a treatise but a living argument that marriage, under eighteenth-century English law, was little more than legal prostitution. The book scandalized its readers then and has haunted feminist literature ever since.
Editions
X-Ray
“Her countenance was all expression; her eyes were not dark but impenetrably deep; you seemed to discover space after space in their intellectual glance.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery?””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“It is a strange fact, but incontestable, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who patient, reasonable and gentle, yet disdains to use other argument than truth, has less influence over men's minds than he who, grasping and selfish, refuses not to adopt any means, nor awaken any passion, nor diffuse any falsehood, for the advancement of his cause.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Perfect happiness is an attribute of angels; and those who have it, appear angelic””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Volume II, Chapter 4"How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call "life,"”
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave 'life,' that we may live.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Is there such a feeling as love at first sight? And if there be, in what does its nature differ from love founded in long observation and slow growth? Perhaps its effects are not so permanent; but they are, while they last, as violent and intense.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Poetry and its creations, philosophy and its researches and classifications, alike awoke the sleeping ideas in my mind, and gave me new ones.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
Link to this book
Add a free, dofollow link to Lex on your blog, forum, syllabus, or reading list.
<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/maria-or-the-wrongs-of-woman-a4b083b1-6343-4637-b777-829b66a8fb2d"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/maria-or-the-wrongs-of-woman-a4b083b1-6343-4637-b777-829b66a8fb2d)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/maria-or-the-wrongs-of-woman-a4b083b1-6343-4637-b777-829b66a8fb2d][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/maria-or-the-wrongs-of-woman-a4b083b1-6343-4637-b777-829b66a8fb2dCite this book
Reading this edition for a paper or guide? Copy a citation.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman. Lex, lex-books.com/book/maria-or-the-wrongs-of-woman-a4b083b1-6343-4637-b777-829b66a8fb2d.Wollstonecraft, M. (1798). Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/maria-or-the-wrongs-of-woman-a4b083b1-6343-4637-b777-829b66a8fb2dWollstonecraft, Mary. Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/maria-or-the-wrongs-of-woman-a4b083b1-6343-4637-b777-829b66a8fb2d.
