Mary and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft, Matilda by Mary Shelley
Editor: Janet Todd
Pickering Women's Classics
978 1 85196 023 1: 234x156mm: £40.00
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. Although Mary Shelley never knew her mother who died giving birth to her, the concerns of the daughter in Matilda reflect upon the convictions of the mother in Mary and Maria - that women have the right to equality of education and opportunity, to fair treatment in marriage and under the law, and, most controversially, that women have a duty to themselves to reject the trappings and false allure of traditional definitions of femininity and embrace a richer, wider notion of womanhood.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) is generally recognised as the mother of the feminist movement. She expressed her ideas in her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788) and extended them in the posthumously published Maria, or The Wrongs of Women (1794). Matilda (1819) remained unpublished during Mary Shelley's lifetime (1797-1851). Its theme of a father's incestuous desire for his daughter was considered scandalous, particularly since its author was a woman.
Contents
Introduction; Note on the Text; Bibliography; Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and Maria; Mary Shelley, Matilda