To her contempories, Mary Wollstonecraft was known for her militant vindications of human rights, women`s rights, and the sovereignty of reason. In various works that made her an international celebrity two centuries ago, she argued that reason in every man and woman calls for and makes possible a just society. This essay studies how Wollstonecraft`s attitude toward sensibility manifests itself in her novels Mary and Maria. The paper also identifies various forces that contributed to the formation of this attitude, including the autobiographical elements, the sensibility or sentimental novels, and the influence of Rousseau. Her two novels combine these Romantic influences in various ways: the nature of subjectivity of the female protagonists, their relationships with men and society in general, and how their Romantic (individualistic and emotion-centered) attitudes clash with the dominant social reality and cause them to suffer painful consequences. However, it is important to see that the two novels feature several devices to keep the readers from uncritically identifying with the female characters. Although the two novels seem to reflect a favorable view of the forces that made up the Romantic side of Wollstonecraft`s work, she invariably tries to warn her readers of the personal and societal dangers these forces might bring about. To establish a critical distance in her readers, Wollstonecraft creates a gap between the narrator and the protagonists, and offers different points of focus and different narratives. These devices are used to further her feminist agenda in these otherwise highly autobiographical and sentimental novels. Additionally, they demonstrate how difficult it must have been for their author to maintain a balance between the rationalist stance she firmly believed in, and the sentimental and Romantic sensibility that came to dominate the European literary scene for the next three decades, of which she herself was a precursor.