Lady Mary Walker

Writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, LMW was a didactic novelist who cared for social issues and for personal morality, privileging the discussion of such issues and the communication of information over narrative or plot. The extent of her publication is unclear: three extant novels in English, one in French, and another in English which seems not to survive, plus an alleged pamphlet. Her views are conservative and very cautiously feminist. She admires learning in women and wishes more of them to pursue it, but she endorses the absolute rights of fathers to their children's obedience. Although she strongly paints the unjust suffering inflicted on women in unhappy marriages, she does not advocate resistance.