Complete and unabridged, with 53 full-page plates by Thomas Rowlandson, Thomas Gainsborough and Richard Wilson. Maria wakes in a private madhouse where her husband has confined her, with her child taken and no law on her side. Wollstonecraft was writing it when she died in childbirth at thirty-eight, and it stops mid-sentence with the endings sketched in notes; her widower published the fragment, ruining her reputation for a century by telling the truth about her life. Fifty-three plates after Hogarth and Gainsborough follow her through the cottages, prisons and landscapes of an England with no place for a woman on her own.
