Feminism by Margaret Walters

with some ideal and truly loving man, simply because their lives are so empty. But it is in part Wollstonecraft’s inconsistencies, her implicit recognition that there are no easy solutions to the problems she explores, that make her such an enduringly interesting writer. She sadly acknowledges that even the most sensible people are likely to fall prey to ‘violent and 36

    3. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first English women to write eloquently, and at times angrily, about the rights of women – and the wrongs they often experience. Her writings have never really gone out of fashion, and a great many modern women have responded eagerly, and gratefully, to her work.
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    constant passion’; as she found, to her cost, when, on a visit to Paris in 1793, she met and fell in love with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. Her letters, after a happy beginning, become increasingly desperate as she complains about his blatant indifference. Pregnant by Imlay and thoroughly miserable, she still managed to work hard on her Historical View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution . Her attitude to women revolutionaries was ambiguous, to say the least, and affected, perhaps, by her anxiety, given her personal situation, to assert her own respectability. When, in October 1789, Paris marketwomen marched to Versailles and invaded the palace to put their complaints to the king, Wollstonecraft had no sympathy at all. She remarked, shuddering, that they were ‘the lowest refuse of the streets, women who had thrown off the virtues of one sex without having the power to assume more than the vices of the other’.
    After her baby, Fanny, was born, she undertook a trip to Sweden (taking along the baby and a nurse) on business for Imlay. Her minism
    Letters from the trip, published in 1796, are (unlike her letters from Fe
    Paris) both perceptive and engaging. But when she arrived back in London, she found Imlay living with another woman. She survived a suicide attempt – having thrown herself into the Thames – and eventually married William Godwin.
    The unfinished second novel that Wollstonecraft left behind when she died in 1797, Maria; Or the Wrongs of Women , is pure melodrama; but perhaps only melodramatic exaggeration could help her express her lasting sense of anger and frustration about the situation of women. Her heroine, Maria, has been imprisoned in a madhouse by her vicious and dishonest husband, who wants to gain control of her property. ‘Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?’ she asks.
    Perhaps the most interesting section of the book has Maria making friends with her warder, a woman called Jemima, whose story, she discovers, is at least as sad as her own. As a child she was victimized 38
    Fiction
    Through the 18th century, increasing numbers of women had been reading prose fiction because it reflected, or commented on, their own hopes and difficulties. But they were also writing novels that often explored the possibilities and problems in their own lives. Some concentrated on everyday domestic life; the best of them – Fanny Burney, at times, certainly Jane Austen – ask serious questions about the choices facing girls, particularly about marriage and its consequences.
    Th
    e 18th centur
    ‘Gothic’ fiction, which tackled the same questions through melodrama, was immensely popular. In scores of stories, an innocently virtuous heroine finds herself in a nightmarish y: Amaz
    world where she has to fight masculine predators for her chastity, even her survival. The ‘sensibility’ that character-ons of th
    ized Samuel Richardson’s heroines – Pamela (1741), who gets her man, and the tragic Clarissa (1748) – is taken to e pen
    extremes, while Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
    (1794) and The Italian (1797) are slightly later, more knowing, versions of Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman .
    Jane Austen affectionately parodied Gothic excesses in
    Northanger Abbey (1818);