Mary Wollstonecraft, página 2 de 5

In 1790 came that "extraordinary outburst of passionate intelligence," Mary Wollstonecrafts reply to Edmund Burkes attack on the principles of the French Revolution entitled a "Vindication of the Rights of Men." In this pamphlet she held up to scorn Burkes defence of monarch and nobility, his merciless sentimentality. "It is one of the most dashing political polemics in the language," Mr. Taylor writes enthusiastically, "and has not had the attention it deserves. . . . For sheer virility and grip of her verbal instruments it is probably the finest of her works. Some of her sentences have the quality of a sword-edge, and they flash with the rapidity of a practised duellist. It was written at a white heat of indignation; yet it is altogether typical of the writer that, in the midst of the work, quite suddenly, she had one of her fits of callousness and morbid temper, and declared she would not go on. With great skill Johnson persuaded her to take it up again; and with equal suddenness her eagerness returned, and the book was finished and published before any one else could answer Burke."

This book was written while Wollstonecrafts experience as school-mistress and governess was still fresh in her memory. As she explained in the preface, her object was to make up, in some measure, for the defective education or moral training which, as a rule, children in those days received from their parents. In addressing a youthful audience, Mary was as deeply inspired by her love of goodness, per se, and her detestation of conventional conceptions of virtue, as she was afterwards in appealing to older readers. She represents, in her book, two little girls, aged respectively twelve and fourteen, who have been sadly neglected during their early years, but fall, fortunately, at this period of their life, under the care of a Mrs. Mason, who at once undertakes to form their character and train their intellect.

"Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman" is an unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman". The book is widely considered to be her most radical feminist work. "Maria" is a philosophical as well as a gothic novel that revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband.

This book brings together three extraordinary novels by an extraordinary pair, Mary Wollstonecraft, radical feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Mary Shelley, her daughter, author of Frankenstein. In Mary (1788), Mary Wollstonecraft explores the position of an alienated intellectual woman and, in portraying her struggle against the constraints of a claustrophobic feminine world, began a line that would include the more substantial heroines of Jane Eyre and Villette. In the posthumously published Maria (1798) she continues in fiction the arguments of the Vindication. Mary Shelley wrote Matilda in 1819, while in mourning for her first son. William Godwin, Mary's father, found its subject of father-daughter incest so 'disgusting and detestable' that he refused to publish it and the work remained suppressed for over a century. In her illuminating introduction to this edition Janet Todd explores how these novels are linked, not only through the mother-daughter relationship of their authors, but in their perceptions of feminism and female sexuality and in their autobiographical richness.

Editor: William Godwin

Maria, novela publicada de maneira póstuma en 1798, talvez sexa a obra máis radical da súa autora, Mary Wollstonecraft. O texto xira arredor das múltiples inxustizas que debe aturar a muller polo mero feito de selo. Asi, a protagonista, Maria, presa no interior dun alxube, vai narrando en primeira persoa as aciagas circunstancias do seu pasado, ateigado de episodios de gran crueldade tal que o rapto da sua filla ou non poucos abusos fisicos e psiquicos. O lector sabera en paralelo do seu presente, mais ese relato, que inclue unha historia sentimental de epoca transmitida con todo luxo de detalles, da por desgraza nun texto inacabado, xa que a autora morreu ao pouco de traer ao mundo unha filla.O valor historico da presente novela e evidente, pois Maria supon un dos primeiros achegamentos na historia do feminismo a cuestion da clase social. Polo demais, a obra conten unha serie de pasaxes autobiograficas que lle engaden novos atractivos. Con todo e iso, o certo e que non se trata dunha lectura sinxela, por ser a expresion de Wollstonecraft a miudo requintada e sisuda, non sempre fluida, produto talvez de ser ela autodidacta.

Douscentos doce anos despois de que se editase en Inglaterra A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) dáse ó prelo unha edición galega do que segue a ser o texto fundador do feminismo moderno. Este ensaio, que se considera un dos piares fundamentais da loita contra o patriarcado e os seus representantes intelectuais mais inmediatos, ofrece un modelo de vision do mundo que as britanicas e as europeas non tiñan a finais do seculo XVIII e do que a sociedade no seu conxunto ainda carece hoxe. A sua autora Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) e unha das grandes e descoñecidas seguidoras do espirito da Ilustracion e das ansias de liberdade xurdidas co gallo da Revolucion Francesa que non chegaron a vivir as melloras deste cambio

This volume, with its erudite introduction by Mario Praz, presents three of the most celebrated Gothic novels: The Castle of Otranto, published pseudonymously in 1765, is one of the first of the genre and the most truly Gothic of the three. Vathek (1786), an oriental tale by an eccentric millionaire, exotically combines Gothic romanticism with the vivacity of The Arabian Nights and is a narrative tour de force. The story of Frankenstein (1818) and the monster he created is as spine-chilling today as it ever was; as in all Gothic novels, horror is the keynote.

La sociedad en la que vivió la autora de Vindicación de los derechos de la mujer y la muestra son obviamente muy diferentes. De los albores de la modernidad y del culto a la razón hemos pasado a la posmodernidad y a la celebracion, o a la resignacion

María, o los agravios de la mujer, narra las iniquidades de la situación jurídica de la mujer en la que se defiende su derecho a la libertad sexual atacando a la vez el rechazo social.Como afirma Claire Tomalin, una de sus biografas, lo mas remarcable de Maria fue su rotunda afirmacion de que las mujeres tenian sentimientos y derechos sexuales, y que el presunto refinamiento que trataba de oscurecer ese aspecto era, de hecho, degradante.Mary Wollstonecraft hizo algo nuevo: ver la vida a traves de los ojos de las mujeres, Maria, o los agravios de la mujer esta repleta de chicas de servir, despedidas al descubrirse su embarazo; chicas que intentan abortar o suicidarse, objeto de todo tipo de abusos; mujeres maltratadas y vilipendiadas; esposas trabajadoras cuyos maridos les quitan todo su salario; pacientes de hospital objeto de experimentos dictados por el interes de medicos y estudiantes; mujeres encerradas en manicomios y bajo una total indefension.Maria, o los agravios de la mujer, que quedo en estado desordenado y fragmentario a la muerte de su autora, supuso una importante contribucion al exiguo grupo de obras realizadas por escritoras que ahondaron en el dolor de las mujeres de su tiempo.Una valiente novela que relata la masa silenciosa de mujeres que descubrieron un mundo vacio de oportunidades y de felicidad.

Selección de cartas escritas durante el largo viaje que emprendió Mary Wollstonecraft por Suecia, Noruega y Dinamarca; se ha considerado que, en conjunto, este epistolario constituye una obra seminal en el desarrollo del lenguaje del romanticismo ingles. La autora crea una nueva literatura epistolar en la que reflexiona sobre el progreso y el estado de las naciones, al tiempo que plasma sus impresiones del paisaje, la flora y la fauna, los habitantes de los pueblos que visita, sus costumbres, asi como la experiencia que todo esto va dejando en su alma.

Wollstonecrafts philosophical and gothic novel revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband. It focuses on the societal rather than the individual "wrongs of woman" and criticizes what Wollstonecraft viewed as the patriarchal institution of marriage in eighteenth-century Britain and the legal system that protected it