"[...] and he, still the master of his own fate, enjoys the smiles of a world, that would brand her with infamy, did she, seeking consolation, venture to retaliate." Oh, dear Mary Wollstonecraft. Such a brilliant mind. So ahead of her time. It's a shame she never got to finish this book.

3.5/5 starsThis was quite a radical feminist text! Since the author died before the completion of this work, it's hard to give it a higher rating, but I did quite enjoy what I read.

Has some very interesting and eyebrow raising content, but the novel lacks fluidity and reads like a fractured melodramatic biography of oppressed women's lives.

read for feminist theory/lit!

Having to read a book because I have to read it has almost always guaranteed that I don’t end up enjoying it. Or that I enjoy it a whole lot less than if I’d chosen to read it for leisure. That was the exact case with this book unsurprisingly. Mary Wollstonecraft was years and years ahead of her time. I appreciated the radical feminist sentiments of this novel knowing that she lived in a time when women were still treated like dainty figurines that had no other purpose than to keep the home and

This book was another powerful read for me. I think this should be essential fiction read for feminists. Truly ground breaking stuff for the time period it was written in.

2018 Reading Challenge: related to feminismI'm so proud of myself for choosing to not depend on a man

I read this for my Gothic and Romantic Fiction module.Wow. This book contained some of the toughest yet most realistic depictions of women throughout time. Wollstonecraft repeats on multiple occasions just how poorly women were treated and shines a light on how wrong it is for women to be treated that way. To me, this book feels like a text that was way ahead of its time, and a lot of the mistreatment is still happening in today's society, which goes to show how little progress we have actually

Okay, first of all, this is not a reflection on the politics of the novel. This book is a stark, eye-opening look at the non-existent rights of women in the eighteenth century. After marriage, they were owned by their husbands. Any money they had, any property, was his by rights. The children were his by rights. A husband could divorce his wife for adultery. A wife needed more than that. This novel is a great critique of the time period, written by a woman who lived in it. That said, I rate book...

Achieved little. Did not stimulate my sympathy for suppressed women as each and every woman in the story had a tale of how they had been cheated by man, while every man encountered in the text was fastidious, haughty, arrogant, abusive, alcoholic, getting other women pregnant, or were falling in love with the main heroine. I don't know about you, but after sixty some odd pages of annoying sappy tales of "suppressed" women, I'm ready to start punching kittens.

you....you're telling me we don't even really know how it was supposed to end??

She should stick to the day job instead of writing fiction.

Gothic feminist tragedy might be my new favorite genre. I totally loved this book. The style of writing was just gorgeous. I loved the start being locked up in a mental institution but how the real horror was just the way women were treated. The book wasn't completed which is a shame as it seemed like things were going to get much worse for our heroine. Reading this after having read the Eve and the New Jerusalem book was really good. It was sad reading this knowing that change was so slow for w...

3.5/5Name me a white man whose authorial repute and chain of influence was sunken for a century or more not out of obscurity or lack of opportunity, but reputation. They said some things, they slept around, they did one or the other or all the actions prescribed as social ills by some and declared as damnation by the voices that count. Come. Just one. Considering the rate at which famous names of that demographic are revealed to be murderers and rapists and pedophiles, it can't be hard to find j...

Wollstonecraft was way ahead of her time with this feminist novel, outlining everything that was wrong with British society in the 1780s and 90s.

This is, as other reviewers have already argued, the very passionate outpourings of a woman who was immensely conscious of the wrongs which were everyday being perpetrated against her sex in the time in which she lived. The story relates the history of Maria who has been shut up in a private madhouse by her husband because he wishes to gain control of her fortune. Stealing her baby ("from her breast") after employing a woman to drug her, Maria wakes up in the gothic confines of the lunatic asylu...

4/16 Oh god this sucks. It's a Gothic novel without the fun ridiculousness that The Monk had, just a prison. NOT looking forward to reading her other work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.4/26 I've skimmed it and am going to consider myself done with this book until finals time--provided I decide I absolutely MUST use it and cannot just memorize all the other readings for the class. Godawful, honest. Vindication was at least a manifesto, problematic as well, but this is drippy sentimental tr...

I've seen a few reviews saying this was an unfinished work of Mary Wollstonecraft and I can totally see that, but it was an very intriguing read nevertheless

One of the novels she left unfinished after her death. This one is very much in the vein of her other books and I honestly would not have read it if it weren't required for my history of political thought class. I suppose it can be an interesting look at how women were treated during the Enlightenment time period, from the POV of a woman, but it seemed to me to be a long social and political rant disguised as a novel. I do wish she had finished it however, as the manuscript ended just as there w...

Read for EN4363: Romantic Writing and Women.Although it looks like this book took me a fortnight to read, in reality I probably could have read it in half a day. I just wasn't terribly inspired to read yet another depressing novel about the state of women in late eighteenth century Britain. And on top of that, Mary Wollstonecraft isn't a great fiction-writer. Fantastic as her Vindication of the Rights of Woman is, her talent doesn't seem to transfer from non-fiction to storytelling. I think the