“Genius will educate itself.” 255least once in the latter part of the 1790s and remained friends with Wil-
liam Godwin after Wollstonecraft’s death. When Wollstonecraft situated
the eponymous protagonist in Maria in a locked asylum, and attributed to
her the thought, “was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?”
she was drawing on associations that were at once part of the political
and novelistic rhetoric of the time and which Smith, most notably, had
made intensely personal. Maria’s imprisonment encodes the injustice and
oppression of “matrimonial despotism”: she is a prisoner because of the
“selfi sh schemes of her tyrant —her husband.” She also feels “marriage
had bastilled me for life”— a reminder that the throwing open of the Bas-
tille had marked the beginning of the French Revolution (Wollstonecraft
1989, 1:84, 86, 88, 146).
Conservative commentators were inclined to link Smith, Wollstonecraft,
and Mary Robinson as prominent women who shared liberal social and
political views. Robinson met Wollstonecraft in 1796 and became friends
with her and Godwin: they often took tea together. (Smith, by contrast,
was anxious not to be confounded with the more scandalous Robinson.)
Another tea-drinking friend whose writing was infl uenced by the Rights of
Woman and who in some degree, like Smith, infl uenced Wollstonecraft’s
later fi ction was Mary Hays. Hays became a disciple of Wollstonecraft af-
ter submitting her Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1792) to
the more established writer for her comments. Ironically, Wollstonecraft
advised her to be less personal, to keep herself as author in the background;
but Hays’s experimental, epistolary novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney
(1796) followed Smith in asserting the authenticity of the fi ction by gestur-
ing to the personal experience of the author. Hays had been disappointed in
love. She spoke about her sufferings to William Godwin. Caroline Franklin
suggests that Godwin might have encouraged Hays to “exorcise her demons
through fi ctionalising her experience in a novel” (Franklin 2004, 173).
If Maria is a “fi ctional corollary” of the Rights of Woman, extending its
arguments as Moira Ferguson shows, it also pays homage to both Hays’s
and Smith’s autobiographical projections by adopting a confessional man-
ner (Ferguson 1975). Smith’s biographer Loraine Fletcher puts it bluntly:
while the Rights of Woman praises reason and control, “one would hardly
recognise the same hand in Maria, which is violent and personal” (Fletcher
1998, 278 –279). The shift is an important one. Wollstonecraft’s legacy in
the nineteenth century, especially in Britain, was to be partly determined
by what George Eliot in a newspaper article described as the “vague prej-
udice” against her. This prejudice Harriet Martineau in her Autobiogra-
phy rather more brusquely defi ned: Wollstonecraft was “a poor victim of