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Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797) Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Women.
London: Printed for J. Johnson and GG. & J. Robinson, 1798.
First edition, four 12mo volumes, each with half-titles present, in original blue paper-covered boards, neatly rebacked with new cream-colored paper spines and paper labels; 19th-century signature of John Flather of St. John's College, Cambridge in each volume; ex libris Boston Athenaeum, with ownership stamps to each title and deaccession stamps dating their sale as duplicates on November 18, 1882; some staining to contents, some boards chipped, institutional stamps confined to titles, 6 1/2 x 3 3/4 in.
The first two volumes in this set contain the text of Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, an unfinished sequel to Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, crafted as a gothic novel. In it, the author shows the destruction wrought on women due to structural and institutionalized subjugation. In the story, Maria's husband has her imprisoned in an insane asylum, separating her from a newborn daughter. "Her infant's image was continually floating in Maria's sight, and the first smile of intelligence remembered, as none but a mother; an unhappy mother, can conceive. She heard her half speaking half cooing, and felt the little twinkling fingers on her burning bosom-- a bosom bursting with the nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining in vain. [...] She mourned for her child, lamented she was a daughter, and anticipated the aggravated ills of life that her sex rendered almost inevitable."
The third and fourth volumes contain a selection of Wollstonecraft's letters, the unfinished Cave of Fancy; On Poetry; and ends with Hints. Chiefly designed to have been incorporated in the Second Part of the Vindication.
