Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman

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.