impossible it is for poor or degraded women to find employment.
The incidents selected by Mary to prove her case are, it must be admitted, disagreeable, and the minor details too frequently revolting. The stories of Maria, Darnford, and Jemima are records of shame and crime, little less unpleasant than the realism of a Zola. It is an astonishing production, even for an age when Fielding and Smollett were not considered coarse. But, as was the case in the Rights of Women, this plainness of speech was due not to a delight in impurity and uncleanliness for their own sakes, but to Mary's certainty that by the proper use of subjects vile in themselves, she could best establish principles of purity. Whatever may be thought of her moral creed and of her manner of promulgating it, no reader of her books can deny her the respect which her courage and sincerity evoke. Maria seemed to many of its readers an unanswerable proof of the charge of immorality brought against its authoress. Mrs. West, in her Letters to a Young Man, pointed to it as evidence of Mary's unfitness for the world beyond the grave. The Biographical Dictionary undoubtedly referred to it when it declared that much of the four volumes of Mary's posthumous writings had better been suppressed, as ill calculated to excite sympathy for one who seems to have rioted in sentiments alike repugnant to religion, sense, and decency. Modern readers have been kinder. The following is Miss Mathilde Blind's criticism, which, though somewhat enthusiastic, shows a keen appreciation of the redeeming merits of the book:—
