Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman - Style

Style

In her pieces for the Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft developed a set of criteria for what constitutes a good novel:

A good tragedy or novel, if the criterion be the effect which it has on the reader, is not always the most moral work, for it is not the reveries of sentiment, but the struggles of passion — of those human passions, that too frequently cloud the reason, and lead mortals into dangerous errors ... which raise the most lively emotions, and leave the most lasting impression on the memory; an impression rather made by the heart than the understanding: for our affections are not quite voluntary as the suffrages of reason. (emphasis Wollstonecraft's)

Wollstonecraft believed that novels should be "probable" and depict "moderation, reason, and contentment". Thus it is surprising that The Wrongs of Woman draws inspiration from works such as Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance (1790) and relies on gothic conventions such as the literal and figurative "mansion of despair" to which Maria is consigned. But it does so to demonstrate that gothic horrors are a reality for the average Englishwoman. Using elements of the gothic, Wollstonecraft can, for example, portray Maria's husband as tyrannical and married life as wretched. As Wollstonecraft herself writes in the "Preface" to The Wrongs of Woman:

In many instances I could have made the incidents more dramatic, would I have sacrificed my main object, the desire of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society.

One model for Wollstonecraft's novel was Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), which demonstrated how an adventurous and gothic novel could offer a social critique.