Whereas many women writers were reticent on the issue of property, or vehemently opposed to improving the position of wives, Florence Marryat used her public platform to campaign for change. As such, her work forms an important contribution to our understanding of women and property in the nineteenth century. In this paper I discuss the ways in which Marryat engaged with the debates surrounding married women’s property, arguing that her fiction was more progressive than that of her contemporaries. I show how her polemical writing brought proto-feminist ideas to an audience they would not otherwise have reached. Through archival research, I also demonstrate how Marryat’s own life informed her writing and how she shared her own difficulties in order to educate readers.