In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft articulates her model for a certain ideal female character on the mythical figure of the Roman goddess of the moon, Diana:

For Wollstonecraft, this ideal ‘modest’ female character is primarily one who experiences reverie: feeling that she is under Diana's tutelage, her steps are ‘wandering’, ‘sedate’, and her attitude is contemplative and ‘placid’. This passage seems conventional at first sight, notably because it harkens back to a long tradition associating women with modesty and with the moon. However, it is also punctuated with antithetical expressions: ‘mild grandeur’, which is in itself contradictory, responds to ‘contracted horizon’, while the dame's ‘sedate’ motion is accompanied by ‘conscious’ reflections. As the passage comes to an end, antitheses culminate in an oxymoron with the expression ‘placid fervour’. And most surprisingly, the dame's reverie leads to a sense of ‘conscious dignity’. One may argue that this quick succession of problematic words associating exaltation and restraint to describe feminine reverie shows how difficult it is for female authors to write about women's fantasmatic life while keeping a sense of propriety. On the other hand, these unusual associations may open up possibilities for articulating a new model of female imagination trying to reconcile passion and a sense of the self 's integrity. While Wollstonecraft's Diana model can also be found in her novels’ heroines, it is most strongly pursued by her daughter, Mary Shelley. In fact, the Diana figure becomes pervasive in Shelley's Matilda (1819) and Valperga (1823), to the point that it is possible to identify a ‘Diana paradigm’ in those works.