Mary Wollstonecraft's 18th-century novel follows a sensitive young woman trapped in an unwanted marriage who seeks fulfillment through passionate friendships and moral purpose. The work explores themes of women's independence and emotional authenticity that would later inform Wollstonecraft's groundbreaking feminist writings.
Mary, the heroine of this fiction, was the daughter of Edward, who married Eliza, a gentle, fashionable girl, with a kind of indolence in her temper, which might be termed negative good-nature: her virtues, indeed, were all of that stamp. She carefully attended to the _shews_ of things, and her opinions, I should have said prejudices, were such as the generality approved of. She was educated with the expectation of a large fortune, of course became a mere machine: the homage of her attendants made a great part of her puerile amusements, and she never imagined there were any relative duties for her to fulfil: notions of her own consequence, by these means, were interwoven in her mind, and the years of youth spent in acquiring a few superficial accomplishments, without having any taste for them. When she was first introduced into the polite circle, she danced with an officer, whom she fain…Continue reading →
An 18th-century English writer who challenged society's restrictions on women through her revolutionary works. Her groundbreaking 1792 treatise "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" argued that women deserved equal education and opportunities, making her one of the earliest feminist philosophers whose ideas would inspire generations of women's rights activists. All works by Mary Wollstonecraft →
Browse all Fiction · 17th-18th C works