Literary Handmaids: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Catherine Crowe’s Susan Hopley or The Adventures of a Maid Servant (1841)

The fi gure of the educated maidservant could be problematic for Romanticism, long before Victorians were asserting differences between naïve working-class literates and bourgeois cultural sophisticates.1 For Romantic intellectuals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the servant remained the focus of repressed ambivalence towards the working-class familiar. Rousseau’s infamous framing of an innocent, defenseless servant maid on a charge of ribbon theft transpired in a home rife with literacy politics, where ambitious servants sought to thwart him in his role as amanuensis to their mistress.2 Mutual jealousy over literacy was part of the dynamic that governed class relations within households, generating anxieties that even Romantic idealists found diffi cult to ignore. In England, at the end of the century, Mary Wollstonecraft would revisit the Rousseauvian romantic script in Maria or The Wrongs of Woman, with a servant literate fi gure functioning as its primary literary and social critic.