Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman
Glossary
"
- "The Wrongs of Woman"
- The novel's subtitle and organizing thesis: that Maria's suffering is not an isolated personal tragedy but one instance of systemic legal and social wrongs — around marriage, property, and confinement — inflicted on women generally, illustrated across class lines through Maria's and Jemima's parallel stories.
- Related: Coverture, Maria Venables, Jemima
C
- Coverture
- The legal doctrine, active in Wollstonecraft's England, under which a married woman's legal identity was subsumed into her husband's — he controlled her property, her earnings, and, as this novel dramatizes, could commit her to confinement. The novel's title names this as a systemic "wrong," not merely one cruel husband's behavior.
- Related: George Venables, Maria's Uncle's Fortune
G
- George Venables
- Maria's husband, a merchant's son who marries her partly for her uncle's fortune. His profligacy, infidelity, and eventual attempt to sell Maria's affections to a business associate — followed by his confinement of her in a madhouse — drive the novel's central injustice.
- Related: Maria Venables, Coverture, Maria's Uncle's Fortune
H
- Henry Darnford
- A fellow confined patient with whom Maria falls in love. Their relationship becomes the basis for the adultery charge George Venables later brings against her, staged as the novel's climactic trial.
- Related: Maria Venables, The Trial for Adultery
J
- Jemima
- Maria's keeper in the madhouse, herself a former inmate and a woman shaped from childhood by poverty, illegitimacy, and sexual exploitation. Her narrated life story is one of the novel's central set pieces, broadening its argument beyond Maria's own class.
- Related: Maria Venables, Jemima's Mother
- Jemima's Mother
- A servant seduced by Jemima's father, who abandoned her once she became pregnant. Her subsequent ruin and Jemima's illegitimate birth open Jemima's own narrated history of poverty and exploitation, presented as a working-class counterpart to Maria's story.
- Related: Jemima
M
- Maria Venables
- The novel's protagonist, confined to a private madhouse by her husband George Venables after she left him. Much of the novel is the memoir she writes for the infant daughter she was separated from, addressed as both a warning and an inheritance of hard-won experience.
- Related: George Venables, The Private Madhouse, Maria's Memoir
- Maria's Memoir to Her Daughter
- The narrative device structuring most of the novel: Maria, confined and separated from her infant daughter, writes her life story as a memoir addressed directly to the child, hoping to arm her in advance against the same injustices, should Maria never be reunited with her.
- Related: Maria Venables
- Maria's Uncle's Fortune
- A parting gift and eventual bequest from Maria's uncle, meant to give her some financial independence from her husband. Under coverture, George Venables pursues legal means to seize it anyway, and his desire to control it is part of what motivates him to prevent Maria from leaving him.
- Related: Coverture, George Venables
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- English writer and philosopher (1759–1797), author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman was her final, unfinished work, extending her earlier political arguments about women's rights into fiction focused on marriage law, motherhood, and confinement.
- Related: The Unfinished Manuscript, William Godwin
T
- The Editor's Advertisement
- William Godwin's prefatory note (Chapter I) and closing editorial remarks (Chapter XXI), explaining to readers that the novel is a fragment, describing its planned three-part structure, and transcribing Wollstonecraft's own scattered notes toward the unwritten conclusion.
- Related: William Godwin, The Unfinished Manuscript
- The Private Madhouse
- The institution where Maria is confined by her husband, and where she meets both Jemima and Darnford. Private madhouses in this period could be used, largely without independent oversight, by husbands or families to confine inconvenient women — the setting is itself part of the novel's argument.
- Related: Maria Venables, Jemima, Henry Darnford
- The Trial for Adultery
- The novel's climactic courtroom sequence, in which Maria takes over Darnford's legal defense herself, instructing his counsel to admit the adultery but deny the seduction — an unusual, defiant act for a woman of her era to attempt in her own case.
- Related: Henry Darnford, George Venables
- The Unfinished Manuscript
- Wollstonecraft died in September 1797, from complications after childbirth, before finishing the novel. William Godwin, her husband, assembled and published it in 1798 from her drafts, including notes toward more than one possible ending, preserved in this edition rather than smoothed into a single conclusion.
- Related: William Godwin, The Editor's Advertisement
W
- William Godwin
- Political philosopher and Wollstonecraft's husband, who edited and published Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman posthumously in 1798, supplying the "Advertisement" and editorial notes that frame the novel as an incomplete work and explain its origins.
- Related: The Unfinished Manuscript, Mary Wollstonecraft