ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft is best remembered for her forays into that most "'masculine" of all late-eighteenth-century genres, political disquisition. A woman's only "business," as Wollstonecraft recognized in The Rights of Woman, was the "business" of the heart; for her, sentiments constituted the only "events." Late eighteenth-century moralists were virtually unanimous in pointing out both the appeal of the sentimental novel for women and its dangers. For, on the one hand, Wollstonecraft insists in Maria novel—to a degree remarkable for any eighteenth-century novelist— on the importance of female sexual expression. Mary Wollstonecraft could not renounce "true sensibility" because it was the only form her society allowed her to express either her sexuality or her craving for transcendent meaning. Indeed, given the restrictions placed upon the expression of female sexuality in eighteenth-century society, women were encouraged to view their sexuality as a function of male initiative, a response to present and future relationships, not as self-expression at all.
