By the time Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband William Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and his wife’s largely autobiographical novel Maria or Wrongs of Woman in 1798, Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary ideas about female sexuality and male dominance in marriage were hard to ignore. Critics lambasted both her work and her personal life and Wollstonecraft emerged with a reputation as a whore and a crack.

By the late 1700's, gallantry could barely support itself as a way for men to exert their dominance over women. Enlightened thinkers were expected to be polite, which included showing courtesy to one’s fellow man and hospitable, traits and duties that traditionally fell to women.

Women needed to fulfill their assigned roles in this system—they needed to be modest and stupid so men could woo them with their polite gestures and intelligent banter.

By the time Maria and Memoirs came around in 1798, gallantry and sexual division between men and women was becoming shakier. The changing cultural attitudes combined with the lack of approval of gallantry in Memoirs and Maria made critics tear them to pieces.

Maria tells the story of Maria Venables, a jilted woman with a life which resembles Wollstonecraft’s own. The novel, which is only one-third finished, is told from the perspective of three different characters. At the beginning of the story, Mr. Venables, Maria’s cheating and brutal husband, has put Maria into an asylum after she runs away from him with their daughter. She soon learns her child, for whom she composed her life story, is dead. She meets fellow inmate Mr. Darnford, with whom she falls in loves and with whom she has an extramarital affair. We also meet Jemima, the asylum’s down-on-her luck lower-class keeper, who has been beaten down by a wide variety of men throughout her life. Eventually, the trio leaves the asylum to make a life for themselves. The story is unfinished, but Godwin attempts to piece together notes and unfinished sections as best he can.

Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman is Godwin’s hero-worshipping attempt to immortalize his wife. Memoirs tells the story of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, from her birth to parents who didn’t favor her to her death in a tragic complication of childbirth. Wollstonecraft’s relationships with the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli and the American writer Gilbert Imlay and her subsequent suicide attempts seem to be the most inflammatory material for the critics. Godwin is frank about Wollstonecraft’s life. He speaks about her views on marriage—she believed she and Imlay had something along the lines of a common-law marriage, about the fact she had sexual relations with men to whom she was not officially married, and about the fact Wollstonecraft threw herself off a bridge after she found out Imlay was romantically involved with an actress.

Writing about his wife and critiquing her works throughout, Godwin isn’t the most unbiased critic.  His attempt seems to have been to portray Wollstonecraft as a real person with real problems so others could follow in her footsteps. However, her character was quite royally quashed by the journalists and critics who made her into little more than a caricature of a whore.

Much of the negative criticism of Maria used condemnations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life to justify the writer’s opinion. Part of the reason for the comparisons may have been to skewer Wollstonecraft’s reputation as a person and a writer because of the critics’ insecurity about their own positions as men in society.

Had they tried, it would have been difficult for critics to separate Mary Wollstonecraft’s life divulged in Memoirs from the content and arguments in The Wrongs of Woman. While Wollstonecraft and Godwin included other themes in their works, the most revolutionary and scandalous elements were focused on the issues of gallantry and marriage. Some critics chose to focus almost exclusively on these elements in both Maria and Memoirs and to largely ignore other arguments and Wollstonecraft’s advancements in feminism.