Mary: A Fiction is a novel by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a female's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that geniuses teach themselves, Wollstonecraft chose a rational, self-taught heroine, Mary, as the protagonist. Helping to redefine genius, a word which at the end of the 18th cent...