The Nexus Archive
Early Feminism · Novel
Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft · The Defender of Women's Reason · Age of Revolution, 1759-1797
Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel about marriage, dependency, injustice, and women's confinement.
- Advanced
- ~3 hr 15 min read
- 10 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the Preface guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
The Novel Left Under Pressure
Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman begins with a woman shut in a private madhouse by her husband. Mary Wollstonecraft turns that Gothic enclosure into a social fact: marriage, property, reputation, motherhood, and the law can all become parts of the same prison. The novel was still being revised when Wollstonecraft died in 1797. William Godwin published the surviving manuscript the following year, openly identifying his own editorial joins and the pages that remained unfinished.
The story widens by passing testimony from one woman to another. Maria's confinement leads to Jemima's history of abandonment, sexual exploitation, precarious work, and the poorhouse; Maria's memoir for her daughter then traces another path through education, marriage, debt, violence, and flight. Darnford enters as reader, messenger, and possible lover, but the novel keeps asking a harder question than whether he can rescue Maria: what kind of freedom is possible when the institutions around her continue to recognize a husband's power?
Unfinished scenes and competing endings leave the future under pressure. Love promises refuge; money, reputation and the claims of law threaten to close it again. Maria's wish to educate her daughter carries the novel's question into another life: whether a woman can learn to choose for herself when obedience is treated as her duty.
The opening pages
Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1
Abodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of genius to harrow the soul, and absorb the wondering mind. But, formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, what were they to the mansion of despair, in one corner of which Maria sat, endeavouring to recall her scattered thoughts!
Surprise, astonishment, that bordered on distraction, seemed to have suspended her faculties, till, waking by degrees to a keen sense of anguish, a whirlwind of rage and indignation roused her torpid pulse. One recollection with frightful velocity following another, threatened to fire her brain, and make her a fit companion for the terrific inhabitants, whose groans and shrieks were no unsubstantial sounds of whistling winds, or startled birds, modulated by a romantic fancy, which amuse while they affright; but such tones of misery as carry a dreadful certainty directly to the heart. What effect must they then have produced on one, true to the touch of sympathy, and tortured by maternal apprehension!
Her infant’s image was continually floating on Maria’s sight, and the first smile of intelligence remembered, as none but a mother, an unhappy mother, can conceive. She heard her half speaking half cooing, and felt the little twinkling fingers on her burning bosom—a bosom bursting with the nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining in vain. From a stranger she could indeed receive the maternal aliment, Maria was grieved at the thought—but who would watch her with a mother’s tenderness, a mother’s self-denial?
The retreating shadows of former sorrows rushed back in a gloomy train, and seemed to be pictured on the walls of her prison, magnified by the state of mind in which they were viewed—Still she mourned for her child, lamented she was a daughter, and anticipated the aggravated ills of life that her sex rendered almost inevitable, even while dreading she was no more. To think that she was blotted out of existence was agony, when the imagination had been long employed to expand her faculties; yet to suppose her turned adrift on an unknown sea, was scarcely less afflicting.
After being two days the prey of impetuous, varying emotions, Maria began to reflect more calmly on her present situation, for she had actually been rendered incapable of sober reflection, by the discovery of the act of atrocity of which she was the victim. She could not have imagined, that, in all the fermentation of civilized depravity, a similar plot could have entered a human mind. She had been stunned by an unexpected blow; yet life, however joyless, was not to be indolently resigned, or misery endured without exertion, and proudly termed patience. She had hitherto meditated only to point the dart of anguish, and suppressed the heart heavings of indignant nature merely by the force of contempt. Now she endeavoured to brace her mind to fortitude, and to ask herself what was to be her employment in her dreary cell? Was it not to effect her escape, to fly to the succour of her child, and to baffle the selfish schemes of her tyrant—her husband?
Chapter guides · 10
Preface
Godwin Shows the Seams
Godwin explains how he brought Wollstonecraft’s unfinished manuscript into print.
An unfinished manuscript still deserves publication
William Godwin presents Wollstonecraft’s last literary work as a fragment. She had spent a year composing and repeatedly revising it, and still wanted to rearrange its events. She welcomed criticism from the two friends who saw the first fourteen chapters.
The editor identifies his additions
Godwin connects more finished passages with an older copy and brackets the phrases he supplies. He wants to preserve Wollstonecraft’s words and ideas. The Preface ends by introducing her own surviving hints for a preface.
Chapter 1
A Mother in the Madhouse
Separation from her daughter makes Maria seek help from the guard who controls her days.
Confinement separates a mother from her child
Maria sits in a madhouse, grieving for the four-month-old daughter taken from her. As her first distress settles, she resolves to escape. The house’s master treats her protests as madness, while his instructions make even reasonable behavior grounds for suspicion.
The guard begins to recognize her suffering
Jemima doubts Maria and fears losing her livelihood. The account of the stolen infant reaches her more deeply than the charge of unjust confinement. She begins to ease Maria’s isolation.
Work gives the days variety
Jemima brings books and writing materials. Their conversation has stirred her own hope, while Maria welcomes an occupation that can interrupt her grief.
Chapter 3
Reading Becomes an Intimacy
Letters and Darnford’s account of his past bring the prisoners closer.
Chapter 5
Jemima’s Remorse and the Price of Shelter
Illness, poverty and remorse lead Jemima to the workhouse and the madhouse.
Chapter 7
Maria Learns What Benevolence Costs
The Peggy episode turns a girl's generous impulse into an early lesson about property and authority.
Chapter 9
Marriage Transfers the Power to Harm
Venables turns affection, money, and family need into instruments of control.
Chapter 13
Respectability Changes the Listener, Not the Law
A stranger protects Maria as pursuit, childbirth and her uncle’s death reshape her future.
Appendix
The Manuscript Changes State
The advertisement marks a transition from the more developed narrative to surviving drafts and outlines.
Chapter 17
The Court Calls Domination Social Order
Maria's defense is heard, then subordinated to property and the sanctity of marriage.
Conclusion by the Editor
There Is No Single Finished Ending
Godwin gathers alternate plans and a scene of renewed life.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman?
- About 3 hr 15 min in total.
- How difficult is Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman?
- Advanced. A mid-length novel; about 3 hours of reading.
- Which edition is this?
- The original English text, first published in 1798. The text follows The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria. A Fragment (Posthumous Works, Volumes I-II) (1798).
- Can I read Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman for free?
- Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 10 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman became a foundational text of feminist thought. She argued for women's rational education, dignity, citizenship, and moral equality.
“What is liberty worth if women are trained for dependence?”
Wollstonecraft adds a necessary pressure point to Nexus: the language of rights must be tested against who is excluded from it.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.