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Mary: A Fiction facts for kids

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Mary: A Fiction is a novel written by Mary Wollstonecraft, a British feminist. It is her first and only complete novel. Wollstonecraft wrote it when she was a governess in Ireland. The novel was published in 1788 shortly after she decided to embark on a writing career, an unpopular profession for women in 18th-century Britain.

It tells the story of a heroine's "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man.

Wollstonecraft was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that "geniuses are self-taught", so Wollstonecraft made Mary, the main character, a self-taught heroine. Wollstonecraft describes Mary as independent and capable of defining femininity and marriage for herself. It is Mary's "strong, original opinions" and her resistance to "conventional wisdom" that makes her a genius. Mary also critiques marriage, 18th-century sensibility and its damaging effects on women.

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  • Page reads "MARY, A FICTION. L'exercice des plus sublimes vertus éleve et nourrit le génie. Rousseau. London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul's Church-Yard. MDCCLXXXVIII.

    Title page from Mary: A Fiction; epigraph by Rousseau reads: "L'exercice des plus sublimes vertus éleve et nourrit le génie" ("the exercise of the most sublime virtues raises and nourishes genius")

  • Page reads"LETTRES DE DEUX AMANS, Habitans d'une petite Ville au pied des Alpes. RECUEILLIES ET PUBLIEES Par J. J. Rousseau. Premiere Partie. A Amsterdam, Ches Marc Michel Rey. MDCCLXL."

    Rousseau's Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), from which Wollstonecraft drew the epigraph for Mary

  • A young girl standing in front of an urn and surrounded by ferns.

    Charlotte at Werther's tomb in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

  • Half-length portrait of a woman leaning on a desk with a book and an inkstand. She is wearing a blue-striped dress and a gray, curly wig crossed by a white band of cloth.

    Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1791)

  • Page reads "JANE EYRE. An autobiography. Edited by CURRER BELL IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER, and CO, CORNHILL. 1847.

    Title page from the first edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847)

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