Marta

A young widow is left penniless after her husband’s death and must find a way to support herself and her small daughter in 1870s Warsaw. Marta applies for job after job, only to be told again and again that the positions are for men only. What begins as one woman’s struggle becomes a systematic indictment of how society fails women who have no economic safety net.

Why Start Here

Marta is Orzeszkowa’s most accessible and emotionally powerful novel. At just over 200 pages, it delivers its argument with the force of a punch. The novel was written in 1873, well ahead of comparable works in English literature like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Orzeszkowa does not just show that sexism is unfair; she shows that it is lethal, tracing how a society that denies women economic agency slowly destroys them.

The writing is direct and unsparing, with none of the ornamental digressions common to 19th-century fiction. You feel the walls closing in on Marta with each chapter, and Orzeszkowa never offers a convenient escape. It is a protest novel in the truest sense, built not from ideology but from careful observation of how the world actually worked for women without means.

What to Expect

A short, intense social novel that reads more like a modern work than most 19th-century fiction. The tone is restrained but relentless. Orzeszkowa keeps the focus tight on Marta’s increasingly desperate situation, and the result is a book that feels urgent even 150 years later. The 2018 English translation by Anna Gasienica Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft is clear and readable.