Vindication of the Rights of Woman and The Wrongs of Woman, A, or Maria: A Longman Cultural Edition

From Longman's Cultural Editions series, Wollstonecraft, edited by Anne K. Mellor and Noelle Chao, for the first time pairs Wollstonecraft’s feminist tract, the first in English letters, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with her unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria.

By putting tract and novel together, this text presents a far richer and more complex discussion of Wollstonecraft’s political and literary opinions. A wealth of cultural contexts bearing on the “wrongs” of woman (their social and political oppression) in the 18^th century and on the development of the Gothic and realist novel further clarify these two texts.

Handsomely produced and affordably priced, the Longman Cultural Editions series presents classic works in provocative and illuminating contexts-cultural, critical, and literary. Each Cultural Edition consists of the complete text of an important literary work, reliably edited, headed by an inviting introduction, and supplemented by helpful annotations; a table of dates to track its composition, publication, and public reception in relation to biographical, cultural and historical events; and a guide for further inquiry and study.

Anne K. Mellor is Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA. In addition to this co-edited volume, she has edited the canon-transforming anthology of Romantic era writing with Richard Matlak, British Literature 1780-1830; Romanticism and Feminism (Indiana UP, 1988); Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1995); The Other Mary Shelley (with Audrey Fisch and Esther Schor); Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility (with Maximilian Novak); Forging Connections: Women's Poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism (with Jonathan Post and Felicity Nussbaum). She currently edits, with Clifford Siskin, the Palgrave Series in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. The winner of numerous teaching and scholarly awards and fellowships, she is the author of the following critical books: Blake's Human From Divine (1970), English Romantic Irony (1980); Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988); Romanticism and Gender (1993); Mothers of the Nation (2000). She will serve as the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 2008-2009.