The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft: On the Crisis of the Narrative Form and the Agency of Fiction

• Anna Paluchowska-Messing

This article examines The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft as a text which combines features characteristic of the novella into interplay with other literary and non-literary genres of the period. The work was published posthumously in 1798 by William Godwin in its unfinished form, but the sketches of the endings left by the author and included in Godwin’s publication make it possible to see how the text may have been developed into a complete whole. Wollstonecraft’s explicit engagement in the politics of her times and the compositional choices she made in The Wrongs of Woman as it stands suggest areas for exploration of the text as a work of social critique. This article discusses the way the text employs elements of the bildungsroman, Gothic fiction, prostitute confession narratives, and criminal conversation accounts – among which the characteristic features of the novella make a prominent stand – to examine the efficacy of fiction as a means of bringing about social change.