Novel: Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman

Overview

Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, published posthumously in 1798, transforms the sentimental novel into a radical indictment of the legal, economic, and sexual subordination of women. It centers on a genteel heroine confined to a private madhouse by her husband and expands to include the life histories of a working-class attendant and a male inmate, weaving a polyphonic portrait of systemic injustice. The book’s fragmentary state, William Godwin printed it from drafts after Wollstonecraft’s death, sharpens rather than weakens its critique, exposing how law, property, and custom collude to define female desire as insanity and female resistance as crime.

Plot

Maria is married to George Venables, a charming libertine who covets her fortune and soon subjects her to infidelity, coercion, and calculated humiliation. When she seeks separation, Venables retaliates by abducting their infant daughter and having Maria incarcerated in a private asylum, a legal power husbands could wield. There Maria forms a clandestine bond with Jemima, her attendant, whose brusque compassion and worldly knowledge become Maria’s lifeline. Through confidences and exchanged papers, Jemima recounts her own history: born illegitimate, consigned to a workhouse, sexually exploited by employers and physicians, pushed into prostitution, and finally employed in the madhouse where cruelty passes for treatment. Her narrative reveals how class and gender predations intertwine.

Maria also encounters Henry Darnford, a debtor confined in the same establishment. Their first communications, glimpses and smuggled notes, grow into an intense mutual attachment. Crucially, Wollstonecraft treats Maria’s erotic desire not as a moral fall but as a claim to personhood. With Jemima’s help, Maria and Darnford escape. Once free, Maria searches for the child Venables seized, while Venables invokes the courts, seeking restitution of conjugal rights and the profits of a suit for criminal conversation against Darnford. The courtroom becomes another theater of patriarchy; Maria’s speeches expose marriage as a contract that trades female liberty for male power. The extant text breaks off amid legal and personal turmoil, including doubts about Darnford’s steadiness and rumors of his prior commitments.

Form and voices

The novel fuses third-person narration with inserted memoirs and letters. Maria writes her life story to the daughter she fears she has lost, reshaping confession into maternal address. Jemima contributes a stark autobiographical chapter that answers claims that women’s suffering is purely private or genteel: her account maps the institutional pipeline from poverty to violation to punitive labor. Darnford’s brief narrative complicates masculine self-justification. The shifting voices destabilize authority and insist that truth emerges from juxtaposing experiences across class and gender.

Themes

Wollstonecraft attacks the legal foundations of coverture, by which a wife’s property and civil identity were absorbed by her husband. The madhouse, funded by Maria’s own money yet used to imprison her, literalizes the paradox of a system that makes women pay for their chains. Motherhood is central: Maria’s longing for her child motivates her resistance and reframes sensibility as strength, not weakness. Desire is treated candidly, detached from the demand for female chastity that underwrites male privilege. Sanity itself is political; Maria’s supposed madness is simply her refusal to submit. Through Jemima, the book exposes how class magnifies vulnerability and how female solidarity becomes a form of survival.

Endings and significance

Because the novel was unfinished, Godwin printed alternative draft endings that point in different directions: tragic self-destruction, a hard-won domestic refuge built by women, and legal confrontation that exposes the hollowness of marital law. The plurality underscores the precariousness of women’s choices in a hostile order. As a companion to Wollstonecraft’s political prose, Maria dramatizes her philosophical claims, turning abstract rights into the felt texture of captivity and rebellion. Its daring treatment of sexuality, its critique of marriage and madhouse medicine, and its chorus of marginalized voices make it a landmark of feminist fiction and a startlingly modern meditation on liberty.