<DIV>This book brings together three extraordinary novels by an extraordinary pair, Mary Wollstonecraft, radical feminist and author of <b>A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</b>, and Mary Shelley, her daughter, author of <b>Frankenstein</b>. <p> In <b>Mary</b> (1788), Mary Wollstonecraft explores the position of an alienated intellectual woman and, in portraying her struggle against the constraints of a claustrophobic feminine world, began a line that would include the more substantial heroines of Jane Eyre and Villette. In the posthumously published <b>Maria</b> (1798) she continues in fiction the arguments of the Vindication. Mary Shelley wrote <b>Matilda</b> in 1819, while in mourning for her first son. William Godwin, Mary's father, found its subject of father-daughter incest so 'disgusting and detestable' that he refused to publish it and the work remained suppressed for over a century. <p> In her illuminating introduction to this edition Janet Todd explores how these novels are linked, not only through the mother-daughter relationship of their authors, but in their perceptions of feminism and female sexuality and in their autobiographical richness. </div>