Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman is an unfinished novel by Mary Wollstonecraft, published after her death. It follows Maria, confined to a madhouse by her husband, and uses her story and those of other women to expose the legal and social wrongs women faced. This early work blends narrative with argument for women's rights.
The public are here presented with the last literary attempt of an author, whose fame has been uncommonly extensive, and whose talents have probably been most admired, by the persons by whom talents are estimated with the greatest accuracy and discrimination.
There are few, to whom her writings could in any case have given pleasure, that would have wished that this fragment should have been suppressed, because it is a fragment. There is a sentiment, very dear to minds of taste and imagination, that finds a melancholy delight in contemplating these unfinished productions of genius, these sketches of what, if they had been filled up in a manner adequate to the writer’s conception, would perhaps have given a new impulse to the
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