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First edition. The author's featured works include the unfinished Gothic novel Maria, which dramatizes the feminist rhetoric of Vindication; a series of Lessons for her daughter, which demonstrate the delight she experienced upon becoming a mother; and her Letters, which, among other matters, record her affair with Gilbert Imlay and her despair when their relationship ended. Like the Vindication, this assemblage reveals an author centuries ahead of her time in feminist thought. Maria illuminates the vulnerabilities of women living in societies that are patriarchal by law and tradition, showing how easily they can be deprived of their children, financial security, personal freedom, and respectability by unscrupulous men. It also tackles workplace inequality, protesting the injustice of women forced to engage in low-skilled labour while their male counterparts enjoy intellectually stimulating employment. Whilst the eponymous protagonist of Maria is a wealthy heiress, Wollstonecraft also dedicates narrative time to women of poorer backgrounds and includes a sympathetic portrayal of sex work. It predates similarly groundbreaking novels such as Ruth and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and is far more radical in outlook. Wollstonecraft's husband and the father of Mary Shelley, William Godwin, was responsible for the collation and publication of this text. His letters reveal his heartbreak at his wife's death in 1797 (Kegan, pp. 275-6). Other works included in the volumes are Cave of Fancy, On Poetry, and Hints, Chiefly designed to have been incorporated in the Second Part of the Vindication. ESTC T114184; Grub Street Project 166010; Windle A8a. Paul C. Kegan, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 1876. 4 vols, small octavo. Bound to style using old blue boards, new buff spines and printed labels. Contemporary ownership inscriptions of John Flather (1792-1890) of St John's College, Cambridge to front free endpapers of each volume, ink stamps of Boston Athenaeum on title pages recto and deaccession stamps on verso. Corners worn and chipped, boards and edges a little discoloured and soiled, foxing to edges and endpapers, contents clean: a very good copy. Seller Inventory # 175794
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