Mary Hays

Title page of Female Biography, or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women by Mary Hays, 1807

Mary Hays (1760 – 1843) was an English novelist and feminist.

Early years

Mary Hays where she also lived. Their parents opposed the match but they met secretly and exchanged over 100 letters. Tragically in August 1780 Eccles died of a fever. She wrote "All my pleasure ZX<JXjlhSBGXJZHgcKAJSDGHJzgDKJSGHAKJDGkjsgdkjGHASKDJghksjdgKJSGDKGKJgaskdjgss - and every opening prospect are buried with him". This may have made her outlook very solemn, and spurred her to take up writing. For the next ten years she wrote essays and poems. A short story "Hermit: an Oriental Tale" was published in 1786. It was a picturesque tale, which warned against feeling too much passion. She exchanged letters with Robert Robinson, a minister who campaigned against the slave trade. She attended the "Dissenting Academy" in Hackney in the late 1780s.

Success in writing

In 1791 she replied to Gilbert Wakefield a pamphlet with the didactic title, Cursory Remarks on An Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship, using the nom-de-plume Eusebia. The Cambridge mathematician William Frend wrote to her enthusiastically about it. This blossomed into a brief romance, but Frend was less enthusiastic than Hays. In 1792 Hays was given a copy of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. It made a deep impression on her. Hays contacted the publisher of the book, Joseph Johnson, which led to her becoming friends with Wollstonecraft. Hays next wrote a book Letters and Essays (1793) and invited Mary Wollstonecraft to comment on it before publication. Although the reviews were mixed Hays decided to leave home and to try to support herself by writing. She moved to Hatton Garden. She did not have enough money to buy Enquiry concerning Political Justice by William Godwin. Boldly she wrote to the author and asked to borrow it. This turned into a friendship, in which Godwin became a guide and teacher.

Emma Courtney

Her next work, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) is probably her best-known work. The novel draws on the experience of her affair with William Frend, and may also have elements of her relationship with Godwin. The heroine falls in love with a penniless man Augustus Harley, and offers to live with him as his wife, without getting married. She is rejected and then turns to Mr Francis, a character based on Godwin. They exchange philosophical letters, but in the end he advises her against becoming too emotional. The critical response to the novel was divided along political lines. Free love is seen to be aligned with social and domestic repression is shown as upholding the political order.

About this time Hays started writing for the Analytical Review, a liberal magazine. Mary Wollstonecraft was the fiction editor. It was Mary Hays who is popularly credited with introducing William Godwin to Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1797 Wollstonecraft and Godwin married. When Mary Wollstonecraft was dying, due to complications following the birth of their daughter, Mary (Mary Shelley), it was Mary Hays who helped to nurse her. She also wrote an obituary of Wollstonecraft for the Annual Necrology.

Later years

Hays and Godwin drifted apart, and she turned her attention to other writers, including Robert Southey. There is no known portrait of her in later life, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered her ugly. Her next novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799) is more emphatically feminist and critical of class hierarchies. It is also somewhat melodramatic. The backlash against the French revolutionary terror affected critical responses to the novel: Hays was considered too radical and hysterical. In 1803 Hays proved her determination and earnestness by publishing Female Biographies, a book in six volumes, containing the lives of 294 women. By this stage Hays perhaps realised that it was dangerous to praise Mary Wollstonecraft, and so omitted her from the list. Moving to Camberwell, Hays became known to many of the literary figures of the time, including Charles and Mary Lamb and William Blake. The last 20 years of her life were somewhat unrewarding, with little income and only moderate praise for her work. In 1824 Hays returned to London where she died in 1843. She is buried at Abney Park Cemetery, Church Street, Stoke Newington, London.

References

• Marilyn L. Brooks, ‘Hays, Mary (1759–1843)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 13 Nov 2006.
• Elma Scott, "Mary Hays (1760-1824)," Chawton House Library and Study Centre
• Eleanor Ty, Mary Hays Website
• Gina Luria Walker, "The Two Marys: Hays Writes Wollstonecraft"
• Mary Waters, "Mary Hays (1760-1843)," The Literary Encyclopedia
• Mary Hays, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries, Facsimile Reprint in 6 vols. (ISBN 978-4-902454-01-7)

www.aplink.co.jp/ep/4-902454-01-7.htm

Further reading

• Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
• Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
• Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.
• Sherman, Sandra. "The Feminization of 'Reason' in Hays's The Victim of Prejudice". The Centennial Review 41.1 (1997): 143-72.
• Sherman, Sandra. "The Law, Confinement, and Disruptive Excess in Hays' The Victim of Prejudice". 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. Vol. 5. New York: AMS Press, 1998.
• Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
• Spender, Dale. Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen. New York: Pandora, 1986.
• Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800. London: Virago, 1989.
• Ty, Eleanor. "The Imprisoned Female Body in Mary Hays' The Victim of Prejudice". Women, Revolution and the Novels of the 1790s. Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta.
• Ty, Eleanor. "Mary Hays". Dictionary of Literary Biography 142: Eighteenth-Century British Literary Biographers. Ed. Steven Serafin. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1994.
• Ty, Eleanor. Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.