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Radical Translations
  • Date
  • False: false attribution such as false place of imprint or false date
  • Fictional place: false imprint contains a fictional, invented place of imprint or date
  • Form: type or genre of writing.
  • Female
  • Male
  • Language
  • Noble: person was born noble.
  • Place
  • Role: the main role of a person or organization in relation to a resource.
  • Subject: content, theme, or topic of a work.
  • Uncertainty: information could not be verified.

Maria ou le malheur d'être femme. Ouvrage posthume de Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin. Imité de l'anglais par B. Ducos

Year 6 (1798) Subjects: , Women's rights Forms: Fiction Translation Status: Adapted French Paris URL

Authors of source text

Mary Wollstonecraft

Contributions

Basile-Joseph Ducos
translator
Claude-François Maradan
publisher

Related resources

is translation of
Maria, or the Wrongs of Women has translation

Notes

Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel, edited by her husband William Godwin after her death, is notable for its radical feminist stance. Scholars do not agree on whether this feminist message survived in the French translation.

According to Laura Kirkley: 'Ducos's translational choices, which subdue radical aspects of Wollstonecraft's feminism, stem from the moral climate and gender ideology of the Directoire, French sentimental literary conventions and his interpretation of ambiguities or innovations in Wollstonecraft's unfinished text', Kirkley, 'Maria, ou Le Malheur d'être femme: Translating Mary Wollstonecraft in Revolutionary France', Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies 38 (2), 239-255.

Isabella Bour on the other hand maintains that Ducos' translation was remarkably close to the source text and managed to convey Wollstonecraft's radicality. Isabelle Bour, 'A New Wollstonecraft: The Reception of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and of The Wrongs of Woman in Revolutionary France', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 36 No. 4 (2013).