Mary: A Fiction - Reception

Reception

Although Wollstonecraft initially felt proud of Mary, a decade after its publication she no longer believed that the work aptly demonstrated her talents as an author; she wrote to Everina in 1797: "as for my Mary, I consider it as a crude production, and do not very willingly put it in the way of people whose good opinion, as a writer, I wish for; but you may have it to make up the sum of laughter". Wollstonecraft's husband, William Godwin, disagreed, however, in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:

This little work, if Mary had never produced any thing else, would serve, with persons of true taste and sensibility, to establish the eminence of her genius. The story is nothing. He that looks into the book only for incident, will probably lay it down with disgust. But the feelings are of the truest and most exquisite class; every circumstance is adorned with that species of imagination, which enlists itself under the banners of delicacy and sentiment.

Most scholars agree with Wollstonecraft's assessment of her writing. Nevertheless, they still believe that the novel is important because it attempts to depict a liberated and reasoning female genius. As feminist scholar Mitzi Myers argues, "in her focus on the subjective vision and internal life of her heroine, in her reliance on emotional nuance rather than plot, Wollstonecraft both transforms the traditions of late eighteenth-century sentimental fiction for feminist purposes and anticipates twentieth-century trends in the novel of feminine consciousness." Mary helped initiate a tradition that would blossom in novels such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853).

Published by Joseph Johnson, Mary itself was moderately successful, and sections of it were included in several collections of sentimental extracts that were popular at the time, such as The Young Gentleman and Lady's Instructor (1809). However, Johnson was still trying to sell copies of it in the 1790s and consistently listed it in the advertisements for her other works. It was not reprinted until the 1970s, when scholars became interested in Wollstonecraft and women's writing more generally.