ABSTRACT
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft attacks ways in which female nature has been artificially constructed in such a way so that women are trapped in illusions of ideology which prevent them from recognising the gothic reality of their lot. For Wollstonecraft, however, such a review evades a related but separate issue: how ‘things as they are’ pervert the domestic relation between the sexes so that man becomes the destroyer of woman. Like Godwin’s work, her final novel Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, uses a double title to suggest the identification of an individual person and the social situation that has shaped that person. Like Caleb Williams, Maria or The Wrongs of Woman focuses on the political potential of reading and writing. If the female solitary is seeking self-knowledge, a self-consciousness that is the basis for autonomy and independence, she is also questing for relations with others.
