ABSTRACT

Mary Wollstonecraft began The Wrongs of Woman in 1796, a year of great personal turmoil. She was not long returned from the emotionally fraught trip to Scandinavia recorded in Letters from Norway and the suicide attempt that followed. Critics generally discuss Wollstonecraft's last novel as a revision of her first novel Mary or as a fictional continuation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The chapter argue that the novel is firmly rooted both in the prevailing narrative structure of didactic children's literature and also in Wollstonecraft's own works for children that helped shape this tradition. The ethnographic features of didactic children's literature provided the tools with which Wollstonecraft might interrupt and thus criticize the structures of desire in the sentimental novel. Mary Poovey argues that Wollstonecraft's third-person omniscient narrator collapses into Maria's sentimentalism, thus draining the power of the novel's critique of this form.