Mary and Maria, Matilda

Librarian note: Penguin Classics edition of the same ISBN found here.

This book brings together three extraordinary novels by an extraordinary pair, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) – generally recognized as the mother of the feminist movement, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Mary Shelley (1797-1851), 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 – she moves from her own experiences to examine the miseries of women of all classes. Mary Shelley wrote Matilda in 1819, while in mourning for her first son. It was her second novel and it remained unpublished during her lifetime. 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, personal conflict and in their autobiographical richness.