Recommendations
Books Like The Wrongs of Woman
Best books to read after The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Readers who love The Wrongs of Woman — Wollstonecraft's posthumous feminist novel, in which Maria's imprisonment in a madhouse by her husband illustrates the legal and social oppression of women — will enjoy these works of feminist fiction, the literature of female confinement, and the great tradition of the political novel about women's rights.
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Buy on AmazonA Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft
The philosophical companion to The Wrongs of Woman — the Vindication argues in abstract that women's weakness is the product of defective education; The Wrongs of Woman illustrates those arguments concretely through Maria's imprisonment; the two texts are inseparable.
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Buy on AmazonFrankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Wollstonecraft's daughter wrote Frankenstein while her father was editing The Wrongs of Woman — the creature's persecution and exclusion echo Maria's imprisonment, and the novel is in many ways the Wollstonecraft feminist tradition transformed into Gothic myth.
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Buy on AmazonThe Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The most direct heir to The Wrongs of Woman in American fiction — the narrator imprisoned by her husband (a doctor who insists on a rest cure) and her consequent breakdown echo Maria's madhouse imprisonment exactly; the two stories together define the literature of female confinement.
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Buy on AmazonThe Awakening
by Kate Chopin
The American feminist novel that most powerfully develops Wollstonecraft's themes — Edna Pontellier's awakening to the impossibility of female autonomy within the structures of marriage and society is The Wrongs of Woman's argument made into late-nineteenth-century American life.
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Buy on AmazonThe Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's dystopia makes literal the imprisonment Wollstonecraft described — Gilead's legal and physical confinement of women is The Wrongs of Woman's scenario extended to its logical conclusion in a speculative framework; the most powerful twentieth-century response to Wollstonecraft's tradition.
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Buy on AmazonWide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
Rhys's prequel to Jane Eyre gives a voice to the 'madwoman in the attic' — Bertha/Antoinette's imprisonment in Rochester's house echoes Maria's imprisonment in the madhouse; both novels are about the legal and physical confinement of women by their husbands.
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Buy on AmazonThe Story of an African Farm
by Olive Schreiner
The Victorian feminist novel that most powerfully continues Wollstonecraft's tradition — Schreiner's Lyndall is the first feminist heroine of Victorian fiction to articulate explicitly the systemic nature of women's oppression; her speech to Gregory is Wollstonecraft's argument in fictional form.
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Buy on AmazonThe Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Plath's autobiographical novel of a young woman's breakdown and confinement in a psychiatric institution is the twentieth-century American version of Maria's madhouse story — both protagonists are placed in confinement by the social and medical establishment for failing to conform to feminine norms.
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