On January 30th, 2020, Emily Sferra led a discussion on the radical writings of Jane Austen’s predecessor, Mary Wollstonecraft. Just sixteen years older than Austen, Wollstonecraft forged a new path as an intellectual and political woman writer. In her unfinished novella, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, Wollstonecraft depicts a marriage in shambles and uses it to explain what makes an ideal marriage. Through learning about Wollstonecrafts’s depiction of marriage, attendees debated what makes Jane Austen’s depictions of marriage so romantic and endearing, even today.