Post on 17-Feb-2023
“I sought & made to myself an extraordinary destiny”1
Gina Luria Walker
The affective and intellectual relationship between female
biographer and female biographical subject remains relatively
unexplored.2 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a biographer of Anna Freud
and Hannah Arendt, in Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and
Writing Women's Lives, emphasizes how the process of writing
another woman’s life intimately intertwines the biographer and
her subject; the female biography of one inevitably informs the
other, in important ways that are sometimes fruitful, sometimes
dangerous, to the veracity of both.3 In this article I want to
engage with the vicissitudes of creating an accurate female
biography of Mary Hays (1759-1843) to consider the enduring
presence of misogyny, especially in the academy, that makes it
hard to read early feminists on their own terms and as
contributors to an emerging, vibrant female intellectual
tradition. I also want to examine my own life and the lives of
other women who have written on Hays by calibrating how
prejudices about learned women have blighted the way in which
Hays’s life has been understood, often to contradict or
suppress evidence. Even today female scholars may reflexively
address earlier women in ways that are fraught with the
historical sequelae of sexual difference. Recent commentary on
Hays’s bio-texts and biography points to archaic assumptions 1
about the ephemeral nature of women’s experiences, the way in
which female reputation is made and unmade, and the belief that
women’s lives are all too often mediated by their relationships
with men, regardless of the significance of their relationships
with women.
My own interest in recovering earlier women began as a
student in the required Novel course for English majors at
Barnard College in New York City. I read Middlemarch (1871-
72), in which I happened on George Eliot’s description of
Tertius Lydgate pursuing his scientific “intellectual
passion.” I appropriated the phrase for my abiding interest
in the documented existence and epistemological authority of
women as historical subjects. In the same course I read F. R.
Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948), then the shaping force in
the New Criticism’s approach to the academic study of English
Literature.
When I came to Leavis’s pronouncements that “Jane Austen,
in fact, is the inaugurator of the great tradition in the
English novel.” ”Except for Jane Austen, there was no novelist
for [George Eliot] to learn from,” I did not believe him.4 From
Barnard, I went across the street for graduate work at Columbia
University where, when asked, I said that I wanted to study
Austen as a highly self-aware woman writer at the end of the
Enlightenment. The hoary Graduate Student Advisor declared that
there was nothing more to be learned about Jane Austen.
2
Instead, he directed me to the 18th Century Proseminar Director
who responded to my interest by assigning the voluminous self-
writings of James Boswell in his recently discovered journals
which were then being published in scrupulous modern editions
by Frederick A. Pottle and his colleagues at Yale. The Director
instructed that I analyze Boswell’s sense of self through the
prism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness)
(1943), in French, rather than the “over used” Freudian
approach.
I dutifully produced a thesis on “Boswell’s Search for the
‘Temple of Constancy,’” an unsuccessful quest on his part and
on mine. The Director praised my thesis, but said that I was
“too pretty to bother with a Ph.D.” He counseled that I should
“go home and get married.” I cried all the way back to Brooklyn
on the subway and applied to New York University. When the
Graduate Student Advisor at NYU asked what subject I wanted to
pursue for my doctoral research, I replied, “A highly self-
conscious woman on the margins of the late Enlightenment.” He
sent me to see Professor Kenneth Neill Cameron (1908-1994), the
Oxford-trained scholar who had resuscitated Percy Shelley as
philosopher and poet from his longstanding reputation as a
flighty “adolescent.” Cameron was the founding Director of the
Carl H. Pforzheimer Library (now the Carl H. and Lily
Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle in the
Research Division of the New York Public Library) and initiated
the meticulous scholarship on the Pforzheimer manuscripts that 3
continues today. Cameron agreed that I could study Austen. “But
before you get started,” he said, “go to the Pforzheimer
Library, tell them that I sent you, and ask to see what they
have on Mary Hays.” I did so, and what I found changed my life.
Encountering Mary Hays
1 Hays, 3 Park Street, Islington, to Henry Crabb Robinson, c/o
of Messrs Rutt and Andrews, Thames Street, 14 February 1806.
MS, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, 1806, no. 37. Crabb
Robinson Archive, Dr. Williams’s Library, London;
transcription courtesy of Timothy Whelan. Quotations from
Crabb Robinson’s Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence are
by permission of the Director and Trustees of Dr. Williams’s
Library, London, and the Crabb Robinson Project (editors
Timothy Whelan and James Vigus), School of English and Drama,
Queen Mary University of London.
2 I am grateful to Tim Whelan, Arianne Chernock and Mary
Spongberg for their contributions to this essay.
3 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism,
and Writing Women's Lives (Cambridge HA: Harvard University Press,
2000), 2. Correct as added? YES4
The Pforzheimer Library held several letters to and from Hays,
as well as the editions by Anne F. Wedd, her great great niece,
of The Love-Letters of Mary Hays (1925) and The Fate of the Fenwicks (1927).
The original documents Wedd published seemed to have
disappeared. I followed my nose until I located a cache of Hays
materials in private hands in London: 115 letters to and from
Hays in correspondence with Mary Wollstonecraft, William
Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, Southey, Eliza
Fenwick and others. The Pforzheimer Library sent me to London
for five days to meet with the owner of the letters, Miss Jill
Organ (d. 1989), who had inherited them at the death of Wedd,
an older friend with whom she used to attend public lectures at
Dr. Williams’s Library. Miss Organ was a tall, swan-like
‘maiden lady’—her term—whom I plied with dinner, chocolates and
alcohol in the interests of seeing the letters, at first to no
avail. Finally, on my last night in London, she agreed to let
me have a peek at the documents, provided that I made no notes
about them. She led me into her bedroom, pulled out a small,
battered leather chest from under her bed and then stopped.
“I’m not certain you’re old enough to read these, my dear,” she
said anxiously. “I’m a married woman, Miss Organ,” I answered,
uncertain of the dilemma. She nodded: “But there are delicate
4 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), pages? Correct as added? Yes.
pp. 8, 10.5
subjects discussed: passion, agnosticism, even—” and her voice
dropped “—talk of suicide!”
This was my first encounter with a woman’s recoil from the
threat of contagion that Hays was believed to represent. I was
too naïve to appreciate the magnitude of sexual and heterodox
danger Miss Organ imputed to her, or the implied assumption
that I would judge Hays as she did. I managed to convince Miss
Organ to let me look at the letters that night. She allowed me
to thumb through Hays’s annotated copy of Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In the next year the Pforzheimer
Library purchased the letters from Miss Organ for my use
although, by the time I was back in New York at the
Pforzheimer, the director had already been contacted by
Sotheby’s in London, which had been retained by Miss Organ to
represent her in a bidding war for the Hays papers between the
British Museum and the Pforzheimer Library. The Pforzheimer won
the six-month battle, and received the archive just before I
finished my dissertation “Mary Hays: A Critical Biography.”
I made my way through the materials at the Pforzheimer
Library by and about Hays, read their collection of her
published works (with the exception of Female Biography which at a
cursory glance appeared too long, boring and in the mode of
preachy Victoriana to bother with), and studied the existing
commentary about them. I was increasingly dismayed by the
accumulation of negative, even scathing, contemporaneous
accounts of Hays and her publications. The most virulent was 6
Coleridge’s description of Hays as “A Thing, ugly and
petticoated.” As I investigated various sources that might
explain Hays’s texts, what was known of her experiences and her
reception, the most sympathetic and illuminating were those of
the Rational Dissenters with whom she corresponded and
socialized whose names were unfamiliar, their ideas mostly
omitted from discussions of the literary, political and
philosophical conflicts during the Revolutionary period. It was
obvious that the clamorous voices of conservatives drowned out
support for Hays.
Early twentieth century commentators persisted in such
damning reactions. Among these, the most disheartening
critiques were by Anne Wedd. Wedd had inherited Hays’s
manuscript volumes of her early love letters, organized by Hays
like an epistolary novel with anecdotes, narrative
interpretations and, as Marilyn Brooks has demonstrated, chunks
of verbatim text from Frances Brooke’s novel A History of Emily
Montague in Four volumes. By the author of Lady Julia Mandeville (1769).5 Wedd
had the complete two-volume set at her disposal, as well as
autobiographical materials that no longer exist. Volume one of
the manuscript “Love Letters” is now included with other Mary 5 Marilyn Brooks, “Introduction,” Mary Hays: Collected Letters
(1779–1843) (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press),
20. The Correspondence (1779-1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist (Lewiston
NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004) is this the ref?YES7
Hays documents in The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley
and His Circle at the New York Public Library. Volume two has
not been located. Wedd had on hand Hays’s “introduction” to the
letters, as well as an “autobiographical fragment” which, she
subsequently judged, was “rendered superfluous” by her own
published summary.6 She studied piano in Paris but failed to go
on to train with the master teacher of her choice. At her
death, the surviving papers she possessed were left in a mess
and put in the trash by a descendant in the next generation,
except for those Wedd had published or chosen to retain and
left to Miss Organ or Dr. Williams’s Library. Wedd had
converted to Catholicism as an adult and her reactions to Hays,
who declared herself as Unitarian in 1791, were at best
ambivalent7: she belittled Hays, as well as Eliza Fenwick, the
feminist novelist, radical and close friend of both Hays and
Wollstonecraft.
Wedd’s general stance towards Hays, adopted by some
critics, was amused dismissal. She advised:
Though possessed of considerable intelligence, as her
subsequent history proves, [Mary Hays] was the type of
young woman caricatured by Jane Austen in ‘Love and
Friendship,’ and later represented with milder satire in
the character of Marianne Dashwood. Mary Hays reveled in
the acutest sufferings of ‘exquisite sensibility’.8
Wedd was silent about the frequent passages in the Love-Letters
between Hays and her young Baptist lover, John Eccles, in which8
they spoke frankly of their mutual attraction, sexual foreplay
and temptation to act on their erotic curiosity. Wedd ignored
Mary’s repeated requests to John that he function as her
“monitor” to the mysteries of male learning, rather than her
lover. Wedd disregarded Mary’s wistful fantasies and angry
predictions about the inevitable constraints on her female
future in contrast to John’s more expansive male possibilities.
I read these as Mary’s early intimation that the effects of
sexual distinction would continue to impede her
adventurousness. Wedd denied the signals: they did not support
6 A. F. Wedd, “Introduction,” The Love-Letters of Mary Hays 1779-1780
(London: Methuen, 1925), 2.
7 Imogen Wedd, “Annie Frances Wedd,” no date. where this ms is to be
found? In my possession In her unpublished typescript about her
great aunt who the family called “Nancy,” Wedd writes, “One
clue to Nancy’s attitudes I think lies in that 1944 guide to
Woodmansterne. The family became ‘establishment’, social
attitudes became entrenched, religion and education became
main-stream, respectability became God, and the blessed streak
of independence and nonconformity which characterised earlier
generations of the family were in eclipse.”
8 Wedd, “Introduction,” 1. Correct as added here and next? YES9
her retrospective view that Mary was a deviant woman because,
after John’s sudden death from a fever, she veered from the
straight and narrow of the “marriage plot” to follow her
intellectual and sexual proclivities. Wedd’s finale to her
biography of Hays was tantamount to a second internment:
Mary Hays is now unknown; her books are unread; even her
connection with the literary celebrities of her day has
been forgotten….Yet the Love-letters, with their pathetic
story of innocent affection, joy and grief, hope and
despair, and the side-lights on the manners and customs of
a by-gone age, have only gained in interest from the
passage of time, and may perhaps now form that ’lasting
memorial’ which poor Mary in the first violence of her
youthful sorrow, so earnestly desired.9
This was my introduction to women’s bias against Hays,
expressed in their textual sabotage of her, which, I
discovered, followed a long and circuitous path. To my chagrin,
I found such carping contagious: while I wanted to understand,
empathize with, and defend Hays, her authorial self was so
unlike the wise, steady persona presented by Austen’s narrators
that had inspired me, that I, too, could not warm to her. She
was angry, self-pitying, narcissistic, filled with resentment
and yearning. Her unquiet spirit struggled against the tide of
responses to her as unlovely, abrasive and unlovable,
confirmation that no respectable man would want her. Wedd’s 9 Wedd, “Introduction,” 14. 10
failure to remark on Hays’s rich intellectual life was tacit
confirmation that impropriety was her greatest sin.
The negative reactions to Hays were only occasionally
countered with appreciation, mostly from men, sometimes even
grudging praise from political adversaries. In light of these,
I wondered about the company Hays kept during her long life
with a succession of better-known male figures, the sporadic
attention paid to her and her works and, most curiously, the
interest of distinguished living scholars including Cameron and
Eleanor Flexnor, as well as Frida Knight—William Frend’s
biographer—who took me to meet Raymond Williams in his
Cambridge rooms where he made tea for us under a portrait of
Coleridge as a youthful student. Williams encouraged me to
persist in the recovery of Hays as a radical thinker.
Much of the current interest in Hays was sparked by the
letters the Pforzheimer held; several of the manuscript letters
had been published in volume one Shelley and His Circle that revealed
her interactions with Wollstonecraft and Godwin as an
intellectual associate and intimate.10 Hays’s first book, Letters
and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (1793), purposefully allied her
with Wollstonecraft. “A few distinguished individuals,” she
wrote, 10 Kenneth Neill Cameron, ed., Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822, 2
vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). Correct as
added? YES11
... feeling the powers of their own minds (for what can
curb the celestial energy of genius) are endeavouring
[sic] to dispel the magical illusions of custom, and
deplore degraded woman to the glory of rationality, and to
a tness for immortality. The rights of woman, and the fi
name of Woollstonecraſt [sic], will go down to posterity
with reverence.11
For such unalloyed allegiance, the conservative English Review
conflated the unattractive author and her thinning hair with
her nasty ideas. Identifying Hays as “the baldest disciple of
Mrs. Wollstonecraft,” the reviewer denounced her book as “an
abortion,” predicting that “Female philosophers, while
pretending to superior powers carry with them… a mental
imbecility which damns them to fame.”12
Hays was fascinated by the interplay of mind and body; she
resisted social conventions intended to discourage, suppress
and censor women’s accounts of their experience. Beginning with
the persona of Mary in the Love-Letters, self writing was crucial
to her evolving sense of self and her feminist awareness. Her
accounts of interactions with men played a galvanizing part in
provoking controversy and confusion about her. In Memoirs of
11 Mary Hays, “No. 3, On the Influence of Custom and Authority
on the Female Mind and Manners,” Letters and Essays; Moral, and
Miscellaneous (London: T. Knott, 1793), 21.
12 The English Review, 22: 253-257. Whose emphasis in quote? In original12
Emma Courtney (1796), her first novel, she incorporated letters
to and from William Frend and William Godwin that revealed what
she described as “almost a solitary madness in the eighteenth
century.”13 Hays’s sensational use of correspondence between
real public figures provoked contemporaries’ gasps, as did
Emma’s consideration of suicide and expressions of erotic
desire. She offended other readers by her incursions into male
philosophical systems, specifically Godwin’s, and revelations
of what Mary Jacobus calls her “proto psychoanalysis” with
Godwin14 and Pamela Clemit terms “the collision of mind with
mind” between them.15Unprecedented, too, and anticipating later
feminist critiques, was Hays’s determined textual demonstration
that she and Godwin, as woman and man, could not communicate
meaningfully with each other about the gendered realities that
plagued her. “How is it, my friend,” she wrote Godwin, “that
after so many conversations & so many letters, we do not seem
thoroughly to comprehend each other?” The answer was: “I am a
woman, I mean by this, that education has given me a sexual
character.”16
Godwin insisted on the primacy of “reason” over “passion”
and “sensibility.” Hays saw that perpetuating these gendered
binaries made his philosophy inimical to the liberation of
women. While he was curious enough about Hays’s mind to suggest
that she turn her lengthy epistolary self-exploration into a
novel, his replies to her letters demonstrate that he judged it
13
impossible for a female autobiographer to meet the requisite
standards of “candour” and rationality to be credible or
interesting. Hays disagreed with him, mostly fearlessly. Men
and women were so differently acculturated, she argued, that
only primitive attraction or elaborately structured
relationships were feasible between them: as instinct compelled
them to sexual encounters or in culturally choreographed pas de
deux as unequal marital partners. “This is an argument which we
certainly cannot feel with an equal degree of force,” Hays
explained, “because society has, in these respects, made most
unjust, tyrannical, & barbarous, sexual distinctions:
distinctions which, if they were not tragical in their
consequences, wou’d be contemptible & ridiculous.”17
Emma Courtney was a succès de scandale mainly because in it Hays
charted her unapologetic romantic pursuit of Frend (1757–1841),
Cambridge mathematician, active Unitarian and political
radical, whom she met through the Reverend Robert Robinson, her
most significant male mentor. Frend published a pro-Jacobin
pamphlet in 1795 that argued for the justice of the execution
of Louis XVI, to whom Frend referred to as “Louis Capet,” or,
just another Frenchman. Frend was expelled from the University,
although he kept a small fellowship from Jesus College, and
moved to London where he joined the circle of radicals in which
Hays also moved. Sometime in 1796 he seems to have rejected
Hays’s attentions absolutely, although this is unattested; in
1808 when Frend finally married a lovely, younger, well-14
connected woman, Hays’s brother-in-law John Dunkin suggested
that Frend had continued to string her along.18 Hays’s
“fiction” includes excerpts from her letters to Godwin that
speak of her awareness that she is an unattractive woman alone
in a hostile world.
13 Mary Hays [Little John Street], to William Godwin, [25
Chalton Street, Somers Town], [postmarked 6 February 1796]. MH
0012, Mary Hays Manuscript Material, The Carl H. Pforzheimer
Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations [hereafter
Pforzheimer Collection]. All transcriptions below of Hays’s
correspondence in the Pforzheimer Collection and Dr.
Williams’s Library are courtesy of Timothy Whelan. The letter
has November written on it but is clearly postmarked 6
February 1796.
14 Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the scene of reading (Oxford, 1999), 202-34.
15 Pamela Clemit, ‘Godwin, Women, and “The Collision of Mind
with Mind”’, Wordsworth Circle, 35: 2 (Spring 2004), 72-6.
16 Mary Hays, [Little John Street], to William Godwin, 25 15
As Emma Courtney considered her future, she predicted that
her present solitary state would prevent her from the
opportunities that marriage would have made possible. She
expected to “have no children in whom to live again in whom to
perpetuate my virtues & acquirements – I shall never experience
those sweet sensations of which my heart is form’d so
Chalton Street, Somers Town, Sunday evening, undated
[postmarked 20 February 1796]. MH 0014, Pforzheimer Collection.
Is this the “Introduction” referred to in endnote 5? YES
17 Mary Hays, 30 Kirby Street, Hatton Garden, to William
Godwin, 25 Chalton Street, Somers Town, Friday evening, 20
November 1795. MH009, Pforzheimer Collection. assume more info is
pending for this ref
18 John Dunkin wrote, “You are very kind in acquitting ^Mr F^ so
much as you have – I cannot so easily do it, and perhaps
because I cannot fully enter into all your reasons – he has
married another, but I fear without a Heart to dispose of –
his prospects may be flattering but they will be deceitful
with^out^ the testimony of a good Conscience.” John Dunkin,
Woodham Mortimer Lodge, to Mary Hays, 3 Park Street,
Islington, 23 March 1808. Misc. 2286, Pforzheimer Collection. 16
susceptible! I may be esteem’d, you say – It is a cold word – I
want to be beloved – my ardent & exquisite sensibilities hourly
prey on myself!”19 She declares in another letter to Godwin,
“I am unhappy because ‘my occupation’s gone.’”20 Hays
recognized that romantic love was the only socially sanctioned
career for women.
When Emma Courtney was published it provoked fierce
reactions that clung to its author like a noxious cloud.21
Robert Southey described it as “a book much praised and much
William Frend, the ‘Mr F’ added above, married Sarah
Blackburne in 1808 and, according to Henry Crabb Robinson, it
‘was a severe blow to her’ (Morley, p. 235). Frend had told
Hays of his marriage bluntly in a letter. 1st ref for Morley is below in
note 19
19 Hays to Godwin, [postmarked 20 February 1796].
20 Mary Hays, [Little John Street?], to William Godwin, 25
Chalton Street, Somers Town, 1 March 1796. MH 0015,
Pforzheimer Collection.
21 Marilyn Butler commented that the book “attracted more
remonstrance than any other individual revolutionary novel,”
Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford UK: Clarendon Press, 1987),
117. Correct as added?YES17
abused. I have not seen it myself, but the severe censures passed on
it by persons of narrow mind have made me curious and
convinced me that it is at least an uncommon book.”22 The novel
sold well because readers assumed, correctly, that the major
characters were based on Hays, Frend and Godwin. Hays’s stark
presentation of the desiring but undesirable female self was
unprecedented; it fed fantasies of a new breed of disruptive
women that conservative Reverend Richard Polwhele’s
categorized in his mock epic as The UnSex’d Females (1798).23
22 Robert Southey to Joseph Cottle, London, 13 March 1797, The
Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 305; my emphasis. Publishing
details needed The life and correspondence of Robert Southey.
Ed. by C.C. Southey, (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and
Longmans, 1849), vol. 1.
18
Recent scholarship charts the increasingly hostile climate of
opinion during the war with France and after that demanded
punishment by trial, imprisonment and, sometimes,
transportation for proponents of heterodox theological and
political views. Critics like John Thelwall, Robert Robinson,
Gilbert Wakefield, Capel Lloft, William Godwin and Joseph
Johnson, who stayed the course, suffered: they disappeared
from public view, were spied on or imprisoned and, with their
associates, were repudiated soundly for their transgressions.
Against this impulse, Wordsworth and Coleridge renounced their
youthful liberal views as the Terror in France increased;
their twinned vision of ‘Romanticism’ and the failure of
radicalism triumphed. The intensity of the Cold War against
radicals by the administration of Pitt the Younger shaped
Hays’s posthumous reputation. In a stunning display of
chauvinism, both her contemporaries and some of her later
critics cast her, ironically, as a reactionary. Mary Spongberg
remarks that the radical men were omitted or had their
reputation obscured from the historiography of the period,
while Hays’s experience and opinions were turned on their
heads. She was castigated as both sexually aggressive and a
prude.
Hays was an easy mark, but women writers of every
political persuasion in the 1790s discovered that they were
enmeshed in the French Revolution quarrel. Writing about
politics, they risked being viewed as suspect agents of a 19
cross-Channel movement to radicalize Britain. In the extended
crisis during the 1790s, women’s intrusion into the male
republic of letters signaled momentous changes in gender
dynamics. The ancient question of the nature of woman was now
debated against the backdrop of impending reforms in education
and social standing, and the possibility of reform of laws
concerning women. There was no more explosive topic for women
to write about than the ‘woman question’ itself. The
Revolution debate became even more contentious as it
incorporated competing views on women’s nature, roles and
education. The very real repression of the 1790s had a lasting
effect on women’s writing and women’s reputation and legacy.24
Hays suffered the effects most of all because in the witch-
hunt she was identified as a multiple apostate: “Rational
Dissenter,” “English Jacobin,” “UnSex’d Female” and “Emma
Courtney.”25
Hays’s allegiance to Rational Dissent and its male leaders
further muddied her reputation. After John Eccles died just
before they were to be married, Hays turned to Robert Robinson
(1735-1790) for Christian solace and advanced tutelage. Known
as the “bishop of farms and barns,”26 Robinson positioned
himself as a grass-roots activist, opponent of the government
of Pitt the Younger and doctrinal critic of the Unitarians.27
In doing so, Hays deliberately joined the more radical of the
theologically heterodox, marginalizing herself even further.
Her ambiguous position is conveyed in a letter from the 20
Reverend Theophilus Lindsey, founder of the first avowedly
Unitarian chapel at Essex Street and leader of the Rational
Dissenting community,28 recently retrieved by G. M. Ditchfield.
I am sorry to mention that these zealous antichristians
have had but too much success in proselyting [sic] some of
the other and better sex; one or two of my own
knowle[d]ge. There is also lately come forth a novel, Emma
Courtenay [sic], by Mary Hays. You may perhaps have met
with this ingenious young woman, a Dissenter, as she used
sometimes to come to our Chapel. I am told, for I have not read
it, that this book, wch I should apprehend is written for
bread as well as fame, retails too much of the principles
of Helvetius and other french writers, as well as Mr
Godwin, all of whom she frequently quotes: the plan of it,
being an unedifying ranking love-story, though without any
indecencies, as my wife tells me, who has read it.29
Hays’s subject was the sensate female self. This was
provocative, and made more so according to all the evidence,
including her own admissions, by Hays’s difficulties in human
relations. She seems to have corroborated the Kantian view of
the female intellectual that a “woman who has a head full of
Greek, like Mme Dacier, or carries on fundamental controversies
about mechanics, like the marquise du [sic] Chatelet, might as
well have a beard; for perhaps that would express more
obviously the mien of profundity for which she strives.”30 Her
close associates found Hays purposefully unattractive, overly 21
sensitive, defensive about what she professed to know, her
propensity for flattery used to cover her inability to be
either hypocritical, as she saw it, or, according to others,
socially adroit. She aroused anxiety in other women because of
men’s reactions to her and her own prickly behavior toward the
women of whom she was jealous. Amelia Alderson, the pretty,
witty, confident young woman whom Hays envied, kept Godwin and
Wollstonecraft, separately, abreast of their associates’
responses to Hays. In company with several men, Alderson
reported: “Would you believe the falsehearted man calls her
old, ugly & ill-dressed—he is no philosopher.”31 Alderson’s
reaction to Hays’s fiction was colored similarly by her
uncertainty about the author’s receptivity: “I felt two or
three almost irrestistible [sic] impulses while reading Emma
Courtney to [tie] up my pen & send [Miss Hays] my blessing
directly but did not, for I thought it would seem conceited—&
as if I thought my praise of consequence to her—so I breathed
“blessing not [loud] but deep...”32 should there be a 2nd lot of quotes
marks?
Even Wollstonecraft, privy to Harley/Frend’s identity, who
had accompanied Hays to his apartments for her to apologize for
her aggressive treatment of him, was rattled by Hays’s
behavior. She wrote Hays:
Pray do not make any more allusion to painful feelings,
past and gone—I have been most hurt by your not labouring to
22
acquire more contentment; for true it is wisdom, I
believe, to extract as much happiness, as we can, out of
the various ills of life—for who has not cause to be
miserable, if they will allow themselves to think so?33
Hays’s younger sister Elizabeth, the go-between “Betsy” for
John and Mary of the Love-Letters and contributor to Hays’s first
33 Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Hays, [London] Sunday
morning [1796], The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed.
Janet Todd (New York: Columbia University Press,
2003), p. 344. Original emphasis in quote? YES
23 Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed, Edith J. Morley
(London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938). Correct as changed?YES
24 Should this note be introduced in relation to its place in the text eg For more on
this issue see…? YES Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of
Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford UK: Oxford University
Press, 2013) 6; Steve Poole, “Configuring Jacobin Landscape:
John Thelwall and Topographical Radicalism in the 1790s,”
Papers from the John Thelwall Society Inaugural Meeting:
Jacobinism, Place and the (Re)reading of the English Landscape
(BSECS: Oxford UK, 2012); John Thelwall Society; what ref is this to?
Geoffrey Bindman, The Worth of Words: Poetical responses, Blog. Is this 23
book, Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (1793), was more
astringent:
I much doubt whether my feelings are not equally strong with
your own – though various circumstances may have rendered
them less irritably acute, the only difference between you, &
me, is this, -- that terrified by your example, it has been
Geoffrey Bindman, “John Thelwall and the Idea of Democracy”,
blog of the Wordsworth Trust, 1 May 2015
https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog YES
25 Gina Luria Walker, “Women’s Voices,” Cambridge Companion to
British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela
Clemit (Cambridge UK & New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011) 145-159.
26 Len Addicott, “Introduction,” Church Book: St Andrew’s
Street Baptist Church, Cambridge 1720-1832 ([London]: Baptist
Historical Society, 1991), xii.
27 Timothy Whelan, “Mary Steele, Mary Hays, and the Convergence
of Women’s Literary Circles in the 1790s,” Journal for Eighteenth-
Century Studies 38.4 (2015): 511-524; Gina Luria Walker, “‘Brief
Encounter’: Robert Robinson and the Right to Private
Judgement,” Enlightenment and Dissent, 24 (2008), 54-70. 24
the business of my life, to repress sentiments, which it has
been too much yours, to indulge – in avoiding one extreme, I
may sometimes have run into the other, –.34
There was little comfort for Hays from her few intimates, only
caution and commiseration.
Then there was the private/professional tempest with
28 G. M. Ditchfield advises that the term ‘Rational Dissenter’
was used frequently during the 1770s to refer to those
Dissenters from the Church of England who exercised their
belief in the responsibility of Christians to interpret the
Scriptures according to their own reason. This ‘right to
private judgement’ produced heterodox interpretations of
Christianity. Rational Dissenters distinguished between
themselves and other ‘orthodox’ Dissenters in their rejection
of Calvinism and sympathy with belief in the divinity of
Christ, but as a subordinate agent of God (‘Arianism).’
Alternatively, they rejected Christ’s divinity while adhering
to his teachings as the most perfect human being
(‘Socinianism’). In late eighteenth-century Britain, the term
‘Rational Dissenter’ was commonly used to deprecate heterodox
believers. ‘Rational Dissent’ itself was “increasingly 25
learned Scottish writer Elizabeth Hamilton (1756?–1816) whose
first work, Letters from A Hindoo Raja, was published in the same
month by the same publisher as Emma Courtney. From the existing
evidence, it appears that Hays wrote a review critical of Hindoo Raja
which was published anonymously in the liberal Monthly Magazine
that criticized Hamilton’s work, although the two women were
portrayed as a subversion of spirituality, a repudiation of
fundamental Christian beliefs, the sort of unhealthy
speculation that led to deism and infidelity.” Where does this quote
come from? G.M. Ditchfield, ‘“How Narrow will the limits of this
Toleration appear?” Dissenting petitions to Parliament, 1772–
1773,’ Parliament and Dissent, ed. Stephen Taylor and David Wykes
(Edinburgh, 2005), 91-106; see also Knud Haakonssen,
‘Enlightened Dissent: An Introduction,’ Enlightenment and religion:
rational dissent in eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge,1996), 1–11.
29 Theophilus Lindsey to Rev. John Rowe, 23 December 1796.
Royal Society, London: Manuscript letter in the Priestley
Memorial Volume, 59. I appreciate Professor Ditchfield’s
generosity. My emphasis.
30 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
[1764], trans. John Goldthwait (Berkeley CA: University of 26
in company together and Hays had entertained Hamilton at her
home. Hamilton learned of Hays’s authorship through the
grapevine and confronted her; Hays lied, Hamilton reacted with
a furious letter in which she accused Hays of hypocrisy.
Hamilton took revenge in her brilliant satire of the radical
cohort that included Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Thomas Holcroft
and Hays, whom she satirized as ranting, sex-starved
“Bridgetina Botherim”—as in, “bother him”—in Memoirs of Modern
Philosophers (1800). Claire Grogan, the scholar who has written
much about Elizabeth Hamilton, opined that Hamilton's
“savagery” toward Hays was almost inexplicable.35 What is
clear, however, is that women writers policed each other’s
works, even when they shared feminist interests; their inter-
textual combat exacerbated the fragility of women’s reputations
in the uneasy 1790s. Hamilton was better educated, her tempered
views more acceptable to readers, and she was more confident
than Hays, although she too worried in private about public
displays of her own erudition. The ghosts of past reactions to
Hays still plague accurate representations of her and debate
California Press, 1960), 61-62.
31 Letter of AA to WG dated 22 December 1796, Abinger.
34 Elizabeth Hays, Gainsford Street, to Mary Hays, [Kirby
Street?], Wednesday morning, undated [c. 1796]. Misc. 4075,
Pforzheimer Collection.27
continues about whether or not she was a feminist.
The most indelible public stain on Hays’s reputation,
however, was the Charles Lloyd affair, in which this unstable
young man—a protégé of Thomas Manning, part of the Coleridge
set and whom Hays knew—turned on her. In 1798 Lloyd published a
novel Edmund Oliver and, like Emma Courtney, it was a roman á clef
with characters based on Coleridge and others, and with a
heroine, Lady Gertrude Sinclair, who spouted passages verbatim
from Emma Courtney. Despite Lloyd’s satiric portrait of her and
her circle, Hays continued to see him. One night, in the
company of Stephen Weaver Brown, Hays became “sentimental.”
Lloyd claimed subsequently that, after Brown left them alone,
Hays offered herself to him sexually in an overwrought state;
had he wanted, he could have had her. Later it was reported
that, in company, Lloyd read aloud Hays’s long, revealing
letters to him for the amusement of others, even including his
younger sister. Lloyd married within a month of this supposed
occurrence, and wrote Hays to tell her. He admitted that he had
felt free to slander her because her principles were so immoral
that he suspected she would have “prostituted herself” Tto him.
To This was the story as I was able to piece it together,
mostly from the men’s letters, in which several of theym blamed
Hays for provoking the highly sensitive Lloyd even as they
criticized his ungentlemanly behavior.
Evidence and Editors28
In addition to the Pforzheimer manuscripts, another source of
information about Hays was the huge archive of letters and
journals, still mainly unpublished, of Unitarian Henry Crabb
Robinson (“HCR”) (1775-1867), who first met Hays as a young man
new to London when they both visited Gilbert Wakefield (1756-
1801) in jail for his fiery anti-war polemic that led to his
conviction for sedition. Joseph Johnson, the publisher of the
tract, was also imprisoned. A selection of Robinson’s papers
were available in an edition by Edith J. Morley (1875-1964), a
32 Letter of AA to WG, 27 Dec 1795, Abinger. Shelley King,
Editor, Amelia Alderson Opie Archive, in a recent email
message advised, “I haven’t found an impeccable source for
this quotation either. My best speculation, given that Amelia
throughout her life had a tendency to paraphrase verses or
incorporate common tags in her letters, might have been
playfully inverting the line from Macbeth about “curses, not
loud but deep,” picking up on the earlier comment that she had
an impulse “to [take] up my pen & send her my blessing.” Date of
message? February 14, 2016
35 Claire Grogan, private conversation, Bologna, Italy, March
2008.29
distinguished scholar and the first Englishwoman to chair a
university department in the UK need ref to the name and details of her
book in an endnote here.36 Morley reviewed HCR’s entire archive
which had been previously edited less thoroughly by Thomas
Sadler.37 I found eight disconnected references by and about
Hays in Morley’s edition. Because of their common Unitarian
associations, I searched in Dr. Williams’s Library for
uncatalogued letters and found several more. Without any other
context than date, HCR’s comments made little sense and his
role in Hays’s life was not clear. In the absence of more
information, they further confused. I assumed that Hays had
retired in ignominy, although she was hard at work on Female
Biography, her encyclopedia of women. As Theophilus Lindsey
suggested about the genesis of Emma Courtney, the work was
undertaken for “bread as well as fame,” but more importantly,
as recent scholarship demonstrates, as Hays’s deliberate
feminist intervention in the “great forgetting” of women in
Enlightenment historiography.38
36 Henry Crabb Robinson On Books and Their Writers, ed. E. J. Morley, 3
vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1938).
37 Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson: Selected
and edited by Thomas Sadler (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co.,
1871.
38 Gina Luria Walker, “The Invention of Female Biography,” 30
The first posthumous ‘life’ of Hays attests to Unitarian
support for Hays’s late Enlightenment feminism, perhaps out of
a sense of fairness to one of their own under siege. The
Reverend Edmund Kell, in a brief memorial of Hays, wrote:
The production on which her reputation most depends
appeared in 1803, and is entitled “Female Biography,
containing the Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women
of all Ages and Countries,” in 6 vols. It was written at
the request of Sir Richard Philips, and, being well
received, produced her a fair remuneration. Altho’ still
an ornament of our book-shelves, it may be considered
peculiarly valuable as having led the way to more modern
works of singular merit upon the same subject. 39
Trawling through HCR’s original papers for material on the
Dissenting context that Hays and HCR shared, Timothy Whelan’s
new research reveals, as he writes, “nearly 180 references to
Hays (composed between 1799 and 1859) in Robinson’s diary,
reminiscences, and correspondence. These references establish
Hays as the most dominant woman writer in Robinson’s life
writings, a tribute to their friendship as well as his
appreciation of Hays’s intellect and literary abilities.”
Enlightenment and Dissent, 29 (2014): 79
39 E. Kell, “Memoir of Mary Hays: With some Unpublished Letters
addressed to Her by Robert Robinson, of Cambridge, and
Others,” The Christian Reformer, XI/CXXIX (1844): 814.31
Whelan points out that “Robinson’s life writings focus
primarily on Hays’s activities after 1803, a period Walker
called her ‘buried life’ that commenced with Hays’s monumental
publication, Female Biography….Recent editions of Hays’s major
texts through 1803 illuminate her writing but not her
biography. Recovering her bio-text, reconstituting her life
within a geographical, social, and religious setting, requires
informal sources: diaries, letters, newspaper notices, church
books, marriage and death certificates, and detailed
genealogical records. For Hays, Crabb Robinson is such a
source.” The new evidence, Whelan advises, attests to “three
fundamental connections between the dedicated diarist and the
outspoken feminist: a religious connection as life-long
Dissenters; a familial connection through the marriages of two
of Hays’s nieces to relations (by marriage) of Robinson,
marriages that remained strictly within the household of
Dissent; and, most important, a cultural connection, one that
flourished in the 1790s through the intertwining of several
circles of liberal Dissenters and radicals in London and the
provinces.”40
Thanks to Whelan’s recoveries, we now know that Hays’s
life after the publication of Female Biography in 1803 was
“buried,” not by Hays or me but by a combination of ignorance,
ambivalence and anxiety on the parts of Wedd and Morley. In
editing Hays, they suppressed evidence perhaps from a
reflexive impulse we might call “female misogyny.” Of 32
particular interest is Morley’s failure to include HCR’s
reports about Hays’s difficulties and his mostly evenhanded
observations of her character, interpersonal and familial
relations, and aspirations. Moreover, by their silence, both
Wedd and Morley denied Hays’s blood connection with her niece
Matilda Mary Hays on whom she appears to have had a profound
effect. Morley’s omission of the material by and about Hays in
the HCR archive is even more striking than Wedd’s: no
twentieth-century editor of Robinson had such unfettered
access to his massive manuscript collection of life writings
as Morley, yet Wedd’s selective editing—as Whelan has
uncovered—for the next seven decades effectively buried nearly
200 references related to Hays and members of her family
residing in the numerous bound volumes, bundles and loose
papers of the Robinson archive at Dr. Williams’s Library.
Morley might have recognized Hays’s aspirations to become and
achieve recognition as a learned woman. Morley was a
participant in the early activities of the Fabian Society with
a wide circle of colleagues among early twentieth century
public “New Women,” including Beatrice Webb, Mrs. Bernard Shaw
(Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend 1857–1943) and other
progressives who promoted advancing female education and
employment. Morley was the author of record for Women Workers in
Seven Professions: A Survey of Their Economic Conditions and Prospects (1914),
edited for the Studies Committee of the Fabian Women’s Group,
a detailed survey of the vocations newly open to women with 33
supporting data: teaching at the university, secondary and
elementary levels; the medical professions, including surgery,
dentistry, nursing and midwifery; health inspection; massage;
and the Civil Service. Earlier, Hays had prophesized such
occupations for women. In her Appeal to the Men of Great in Behalf of
Women (1798), published anonymously, Hays expressed the
Cartesian insight, first articulated by Poullain de la Barre,
that “mind, as has before been fondly quoted, is of no sex;
therefore it is not in the power of education or art to unsex
it. But manners may,” and proposed training for women’s
participation in some of the professions.41
Morley likely did not know of Hays’s anonymous Appeal but
she would have become aware, if only through HCR’s comments, of
Hays’s provocative reputation. Moreover, there were significant
differences between Morley’s restrained public self-
representation as an ambitious woman when compared with Hays’s
insistent revelations. W?ording According to Barbara Morris,
editor of a new edition of Morley’s autobiography, Looking Before
and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life (1944), Morley was as an
“ordinary” woman, like other “upper middle class women in the
late 19th century, somewhat later than Hays who sounds truly
astonishing, but has a much lower public profile than
Wollstonecraft.” Morris judges Morley “extraordinary in her
determination and curiosity.”42 In her introduction, Morris
34
cites Sir James Clarke (“Jim”) Holt, a distinguished historian
and Morley’s colleague at Reading University, who described
personal interactions with Morley as “provocative, disturbing,
aggressive, and intransigent: others kept their distance to
avoid collision and damage,” behaviour not so different from
that reported by women and men about Hays. Holt continued, “Yet
she loved humanity…. She was ever ready to fight for the
oppressed, especially if feminine.”43
Wedd was by faith, family pride and experience
unsympathetic, even embarrassed by and hostile to Hays. Morley
ignored her for her own, more complex reasons, perhaps
connected to her feeling that “I did hate being a girl,” as she
says in her autobiography. This also reflects another disquiet:
Jessica Sage, who worked on the HCR papers at Reading, writes
that Morley “positions herself as definitely not the best
female literature academic of her time but rather someone who
was not willing to let the university leave its misogyny
(although she doesn’t use this word) unaddressed when all the
other heads of departments (all male) were promoted to
professor and she wasn’t.”44 Likely, Morley did not dare align
herself with another woman who confronted “sexual distinctions”
explicitly. Whatever the causes, Morley’s editing had the long
term effect of deleting Hays “as the most dominant woman writer
in HCR’s life.”45 The absence of this evidence continued to
impede efforts to create a more complete female biography of
Hays’s own life..46
35
The most dramatic of Whelan’s recoveries is his accidental
discovery of a letter from HCR to a female friend, written on
the back of an envelope, that provides evidence supporting Hays
in the Charles Lloyd affair, “in vindication against the wilful
[sic] calumnies of a man to whom I should ^apply^ an appropriate
epithet if I did not understand he was that he is your
acquaintance I hope for your own sake you do not honour him
with the name of Friend.”47 At the same time, Coleridge took
the occasion to write to Southey about Hays after she visited
his apartments to collect some books that Southey was lending
her for the “female biography” of Joan of Arc:
Of Miss Hayes’ intellect I do not think so highly as you,
or rather, to speak sincerely, I think not contemptuously
but certainly despectively thereof . . . for to hear a thing,
ugly and petticoated, ex-syllogize a God with cold-blooded
precision, and attempt to run religion through the body
with an icicle, an icicle from a Scotch Hog-trough! I do
not endure it; my eye beholds phantoms, and ‘nothing is
but what is not’.48
Coleridge’s alliance with Rational Dissent was on the wan as he
became a more conventional arbiter of public taste and
tastemakers, and his was the opinion that prevailed. His
vehemence about Hays says more about himself than her:
Coleridge rejected both liberal politics and theology; Hays was
the target of his twin apostasies.
36
Female Biography
After publication in 1803, the reviews of Female Biography in
England, France and the United States praised the magnitude of
the undertaking but expressed serious concerns about the
author’s morality. Her choice of figures like Catherine the
Great, Ninon l’Enclos, Bianca Cappello and others that did not
rise to the level of “women worthies” confirmed public
skepticism that the author had not amended her rebellious ways.
The work aroused private anxieties among women like Lucy Aikin.
“Alas, alas!” Aikin lamented about the six volumes:
though Miss Hayes has wisely addressed herself to the
ladies alone, I am afraid the gentlemen will get a peep at
her book and repeat with tenfold energy that women have no
business with anything but nursing children and mending
stockings. I do not think her book is written quite in an
edifying manner neither—the morals are too French for my
taste.49
Mary Spongberg elucidates such tensions:
The distinctive quality of Female Biography was formed by
its selection of lives. What characterized the women who
Hays selected was not merely their fame, but the fact that
they had attained distinction in spite of the labouring
under the ‘disadvantages civil and moral’ that impede
women of all stations. Like Wollstonecraft, many of the
women Hays depicts were ‘great souls’, but they too were 37
shackled by the distinction of sex. By studying individual
lives Hays endeavoured to create an overarching history of
women that linked their struggles to overcome the
distinction of sex with their achievements and ideas.50
If Dissenting women distanced themselves from Hays, some of the
men privately praised her. Pamela Clemit has called my
attention to comments about Hays and her situation made by
Dissenter Capel Lloft (1751-1824) to Godwin sometime in 1805.
G. M. Ditchfield characterizes Lloft as a “radical editor and
writer” who, at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, “encountered a
spirit of theological heterodoxy which influenced him for the
rest of his life.” He embraced Unitarianism, and “in 1800 his
name was removed from the list of magistrates when he publicly
opposed the imposition of the death penalty upon a young girl
(The New Suffolk Garland, 52–4). A few years later he joined the
Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge upon the Punishment of
Death, which campaigned against capital punishment.”51 Lloft
wrote to Godwin:
7 Upper Marylebone Terr 15 June
I have been reading two Productions of a female Pen since
I came hither of which I know not how to speak as highly
as they deserve. The Victim of Prejudice [Hays’s second
novel published in 1799] and Emma Courtney. Both are
emanations of a transcendentally powerful Mind. For the
latter especially I have no terms of praise adequate to
its excellence.38
I have heard you speak of Miss Hays. And I am astonished
[illegible word, “astonished” is my best guess] that so
admirable a Woman with these two Works of her greatly to
be respected female Biography far from attaining
[“attaining” is best guess] to the [ ] of [ ] which have
attended litterary [sic] exertions of many persons of
infinitely inferior merit has remained in comparative
obscurity or has been insulted by [cold?] [ ] of malicious
cavillings under the name of Criticism.52
In 1807 a three volume edition of Female Biography was published
in Philadelphia, perhaps a legacy of the influence of her old
friend Joseph Priestley, who lived in Pennsylvania from 1794
until his death in 1804 , whose private library included Hays’s
original six volumes. Contemporary critics have criticized Hays
for her omission of Wollstonecraft in the prosopography. Gary
Kelly was the first to suggest that Hays’s Memoirs of Mary
Wollstonecraft (1800) served as the template for the female
biographies Hays did include.53
Generative Hays
Whelan’s recoveries provide more accurate contexts for the
53 Gary Kelly, “Mary Hays: Women, History, and the State,”this is the only mention of this ref. Is it: Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827
(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), I cannot find the precise
page, or the pages for the chapter above 39
letters exchanged by Hays and her brother-in-law, John Dunkin,
following the sudden death of her sister Joanna in 1805, and
put to rest assertions that Mary was running a school for girls
during this period. She was nevertheless an educator, only her
pupils were her nieces, the three youngest daughters of John
and Joanna Dunkin, living with her (and possibly her mother) in
40 Timothy Whelan, “Mary Hays and Henry Crabb Robinson,” The
Wordsworth Circle 46.3 (2015), 176.
41 Anonymous [Mary Hays], Appeal to the Men of Great in Behalf of Women
(London: Joseph Johnson, 1798) 187.
42 Barbara Morris, personal email message, April 6, 2016.
43 Barbara Morris, ed., “Introduction,” Edith Morley, Before and
After: Reminiscences of a Working Life (Reading UK: Two Rivers Press,
2016) 4-5.
44 Jessica Sage, personal email message, November 30, 2015.
45 Whelan, “Mary Hays and Henry Crabb Robinson” 276.
46 Timothy Whelan, personal correspondence, June 10, 2016.
47Whelan, “Mary Hays and Henry Crabb Robinson” 183. HCR added
near the conclusion of his letter, “Miss H.[’s] life has been
unfortunate & her affections ^have^ suffered a severe40
her house in Islington.54 In a letter from March 1808, Dunkin
expressed his appreciation for Hays’s role in his daughters’
lives.
Woodham Mortimer Lodge Mar 23d, 1808
Accept my best thanks my Dear Mary for your favor of the
8th Inst –to answer it particularly, I must take it in the
order it stands – my dear girls first claim my regard –
disappointment, naturally very affectionate, of all women, she
is the most ready to form the inferior & subordinate
attachments of esteem & ffriendship. From the singular
incidents of her life it is morally impossible that she shod ever
again love. Let me add too that in the uniform train of her
sentiments, she is pure & chaste even to excess—from which
possibly the unguarded & unrestrained warmth of her language
has arisen She I am confident that C. Lloyd cannot know her
better than I do And as I am very far from being a Lover, my
testimony alone wod I hope weigh agthim If his Testimony could
be received or was not affected – If it were not put out of
the question by his own Letters and general character—”
(Ibid.). end quote? YES 41
tell them how much I am pleas’d to hear of the
improvements they are making, & still expect they will make,
under your kind, sisterly, & friendly attention – also of
the affectionate expressions in their Letters to me,
which will always find a return with Interest, and can
only terminate with my existence – if Sarah finds
48 Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, January 25, 1800,
The Selected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, vol. 1
(Oxford UK: Clarendon, 1956), 563. Correct as added? Orig Emphasis in
quote? YES Pam Perkins comments: “The implication here is
obvious: by both the Scottish reference and the quotation from
Macbeth, Coleridge is likening Hays to the archetypal demonic
political woman, Lady Macbeth, assertive because ‘unsexed’,
and threatening a potential for generalize demasculation:
‘nothing is but what is not.’” Private email correspondence,
date? December 2015.
49 Lucy Aikin to Mrs. Taylor, Stoke Newington, 27 January 1803,
Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin; Including those Addressed
to the Rev. Dr. Channing 1826 to 1842, ed. Philip Hemery Le Breton
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864) 124.
I appreciate Felicia Gordon’s retrieval and transcription of 42
herself comfortable and happy, I am not determined in
taking her back after the year expires –.55
Matilda, the younger daughter, was clearly influenced by her
aunt during her formative years. In turn, Hays’s relationships
with her nieces likely provided the opportunity for her to
exercise that feminist generativity she had mourned in Emma
Courtney would be lost to her because she would never have a
child of her own. Several times HCR emphasizes Hays’s
commitment to her optimistic Unitarian beliefs, her continuing
critique of men’s habitual bad treatment of women, the legal
this excerpt.
50 Mary Spongberg, “Thinking the Woman: Historicising Women in
the Age of Enlightenment,” Representing Humanity in the Age of
Enlightenment, eds. Alexander Cook, Ned Curthoys and Shino
Konishi (Abingdon UK, and New York: Routledge, 2106) 27-39,
38.
51 G. M. Ditchfield, “Lofft, Capel (1751–1824),” Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn,
Sept 2014) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16930>.
52 Letter from Capel Lofft to William Godwin. This letter is
undated, although it is written from the same address as a
June 1805 letter, Abinger MSS, Dep. c. 527.43
“wrongs” against them and her readiness to be “in advance of
the age,” a phrase belonging to a note by HCR inserted in his
Reminiscences for 1819 (composed in July 1851), a clear
indication of his linking of his old friend and her niece after
Hays’s death in 1843. The full note reads:
It is a curious fact, that a niece of Mary Hayes (a
daughter of her Brother John,) has become an authoress,
being as her Aunt was, in advance of the age – if advance
be the proper term, which it is to be hoped, it is not;
for that implies that the age is to follow = She is the
translatress of several of George Sand’s novels!!!56
Matilda had written to HCR sometime in 1844, for he writes in
his diary on 24 May of that year, “Wrote to Miss Hays, niece of
my old friend who enquired about the character of a publisher
of a novel she has written,” a reference to the manuscript of
her first novel, Helen Stanley, A Tale (1846).57 Although the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) entries for Mary Hays and
Matilda Hays appear side by side, no evidence existed to
connect them to each other until Whelan’s careful review of the
HCR papers.
Matilda Mary Hays (1820?–1897) has not yet been the
subject of full scholarly inquiry. She lived openly as a
lesbian in “female marriages,” became a writer and, according
to Lisa Merrill (biographer of the American actress Charlotte
Cushman, Matilda’s lover) who wrote the ODNB entry of her:
... at eighteen [Matilda] determined to use her writing to44
improve women's educational and occupational
opportunities. She became a contributor to numerous
periodicals, most notably Ainsworth’s Magazine and The
Mirror. In 1846 she published a novel, Helen Stanley,
which indicted the social mores that left women few
options for economic security outside marriage. She wrote
in Helen Stanley that women’s conditions would not improve
until ‘women teach their daughters to respect themselves,
… [and] to work for their daily bread, rather than
prostitute their persons and hearts in a loveless
marriage.58
The novel opens with a dedication, perhaps a memorial to Hays
who had recently died: “TO HER Whose love has for years
endeared life and filled it with belief in the true and the
beautiful This earliest effort is most affectionately inscribed
London April, 1845.” The male protagonist in the novel is named
Melville, likely taken from the hero in Hays’s stories in Letters
and Essays (1791) who flees an unhappy marriage to the new world
where he finds love and community with like-minded Unitarians.
The novel is imbued with Hays’s feminist and political values.
Matilda also published the two volume Adrienne Hope: The Story of a Life
(1866), which detailed the suffering of a woman “in a secret
marriage.” Merrill points out that in both novels there is no
mother, but instead a benevolent older female figure.59
Whatever other female freedoms Hays encouraged in her
niece, she clearly influenced Matilda’s intellectual ambitions.45
With Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith, Matilda
founded The English Woman’s Journal. Merrill characterizes the
publication as:
decidedly feminist, although the more radical Hays, whom
friends called Max or Mathew, often disagreed with co-
editor Parkes about strategies for achieving their goals.
The journal's offices at Langham Place served as a nucleus
for the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women and
the Victoria Press, both of which Hays helped to found.
ref
Hays was ousted from the journal in 1864 because of her
“reportedly difficult temperament.” The next year, “she
petitioned for a pension from the Royal Literary Fund, not on
the grounds of her literary merits, but on account of her
‘labours on behalf of [her] own sex’ and her diminished health
from playing ‘so arduous a part as Juliet to Miss Cushman's
Romeo’ (Hays, ‘Memorial’). A pension of £100 per year was
granted in 1866.” Ref for quote?
Hays’s Will refers to Matilda’s sister Sarah, married to
George Wedd, as her favorite niece.60 Whelan judges that both
Sarah Wedd and Anne F. Wedd must have known about and, likely,
knew Matilda because they were all distant cousins and their
life spans crossed at various intervals.61 Morley’s silence
about Matilda may have been the result of her own anxieties
about incorporating a public lesbian in the edition and/or the
46
questions this might have raised about her own sexuality. More
remarkable, then, is the relatively balanced point of view HCR
offers. He was one of the two mourners at Hays’s funeral, the
other being her brother, and kept track of Matilda after Hays’s
death.
New evidence of Hays’s positive influence on the female
intellectuals in the next generation has just been found by
Arianne Chernock. She reports that reviewing the papers of
suffragist Harriet McIlqueham, nee Medley (1837-1910), in The
Women’s Library at London School of Economics, there are
references to Mary Hays and Female Biography which McIlqueham
consulted as sources for a series of articles on Mary Astell,
Lady Montague Wortley, ‘Sophia’, and other Enlightenment
advocates of women's rights, most of them published in the
Westminster Review.62
And yet
In my intellectual biography of Hays, I titled the last
section of the final chapter “The Buried Life.” This reflected
the paucity of information I could find for her later years
when she seemed to play out her own prophecy of becoming “A
Solitary Wanderer,” Rousseau’s evocative term that
Wollstonecraft also used to describe herself to Imlay and,
later, to Godwin. Hays changed addresses often, complained of
her isolation and neglect by her family, and her want of work
47
because, as she had predicted to Godwin, “my occupation’s
gone,” since marriage to Frend and children were not
possible.63 Ref The new evidence portrays a different older age,
filled with family, marriages, parties and supportive learned
female communities, as well as adventurous and married friends
who went to America, made places for themselves and urged her
to join them.64
After the archive of Hays materials arrived at the
Pforzheimer Library, I was able to study the individual
letters. Hays had indeed incorporated much of her original
correspondence with Godwin almost verbatim into Emma Courtney. I
found, however, a section in a letter to Godwin that she had
not included, and that neither her detractors nor her
supporters had remarked. Reading it, I sensed that I had
discovered a key, not to the novel but to Hays herself. On
October 13 1795, sitting alone in her new apartments on Kirby
Street, Hays tells Godwin why she has taken the great step of
moving out of her mother’s house to live alone, nearer to him
and Wollstonecraft and William Frend.
It has been asked of me, & I have put the question to
myself, what benefits I propose to reap from this
eccentric step? Shall I reply, a kind of, I know not what,
satisfaction in the idea of being free, a wish to break by
the necessity of greater of exertion, (I acknowledge the
weakness which this implies) & even by local change,
certain fatal, connected, trains of thinking, a desire of 48
strengthening my mind by standing alone, & of relieving
the relations I love of the burthen of my wayward fancies,
also, I will own, a latent hope of enjoying, occasionally,
more of the intercourse & conversation that pleases me.65
Here, at last, was a glimmer of a more contemplative Hays,
who in her earliest love letters had envisioned an alternative
54 Whelan, “Mary Hays and Henry Crabb Robinson” 177. Are these left
blank for refs to come? YES
55 John Dunkin, Woodham Mortimer Lodge, to Mary Hays, 3 Park
Street, Islington, 23 March 1808. Misc. 2286, Pforzheimer
Collection.
56 Crabb Robinson Reminiscences, 1819. MS., Crabb Robinson
Archive, Dr. Williams’s Library, London; transcription
courtesy of Timothy Whelan.
57 Crabb Robinson Diary, 1844. MS., Crabb Robinson Archive, Dr.
Williams’s Library, London; transcription courtesy of Timothy
Whelan.
58 Lisa Merrill, “Hays, Matilda Mary (1820?–1897),” Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004;
online edn, Oct 2005)
<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/57829>.49
existence for herself and, prompted by Wollstonecraft’s
example, at the age of 34 had acted on its possibilities. This
more restrained Hays recognized that the idea of freedom as her
male associates understood and realized it would never be
feasible for her because she was a woman. She sustained belief,
59 Lisa Merrill, private email messages, date? 12/13/15, 1/13,
17,19 2016.60 “To Mrs George Wedd I leave my books bookcase and papers,”
she writes. See Mary Hays Will, PROB 11/1976, Public Record
Office, Kew; see also Brooks, Correspondence 599.
61 The Dunkins married into the Wedds. Annie F. Wedd (1875-
1958) was Hays’s great-great-niece and the granddaughter of
Sarah Dunkin Wedd (1793-1875). Tim Whelan reports that “Sarah
Dunkin who married George Wedd is the same Sarah who lived for
the better part of two years with Mary Hays in Park Street
being taught by her, along with her sisters Marianne and Emma.
It seems that during that time Mary Hays and Sarah Dunkin Wedd
became very close and must have remained that way thereafter.
It is interesting that Sarah lived to 1875, so she definitely
knew about the exploits and writings of Matilda Mary Hays.”
Concerning A. F. Wedd, Whelan adds, “Wedd knew that 50
however, in an oracular version of female fulfillment which she
had imparted to Matilda Mary Hays and, on the cusp of the
twentieth century, the public “New Woman”—such as Harriet
McIlqueham—dared to realize. In 1806, in a ruminative letter to
HCR reflecting on the differences in their present
circumstances and the contrasting gendered trajectories of
their lives, Hays wrote, “I sought and made to myself an
extraordinary destiny.” Ref Even the newest information
provides little context for this self -assessment; perhaps this
was Hays’s reassurance to the anxieties of her younger textual
self, Mary of The Love-Letters.
We will likely never recover sufficient evidence of Hays’s
interior life to parse her sense of self with certainty. The
sporadic efforts to gather the tattered remnants of her
existence raise questions about how we can deploy female
biography as an accurate gauge of a woman’s place in posterity
in the absence of comprehensive, almost always incomplete,
information. I could not take Hays’s full measure until I
served as Editor of the first modern edition of Female Biography.
In collaboration with nearly 200 scholars from 116 institutions
in 18 countries, I followed Hays’s autodidactic lead as she
struggled to access sources to compile entries of various
connection… since she was a third cousin to Matilda and 22
years old when Matilda died.” Private email message, June 11,
2016. ref51
lengths and complexity for approximately 302, mostly
“undiscovered” figures. In the process I discovered Hays as
intellectually-protean, curious, persistent, creative, and
brilliant, striving to overcome the gendered limits of her
knowledge and lack of training as a scholar to produce the
first female encyclopaedia of women by a woman. I discerned
that Hays “invented” female biography as a new category of
historical analysis, knowledge production and gender selection,
as well as a prophecy and a prayer, to put women permanently on
the human mental map. By providing examples of what the
traditional biographical catalogue of women could do, she
offered new thinking about what such a catalogue should do.66
Hays anticipated the initiative in the second half of the 62 I appreciate Arianne Chernock calling this to my attention.
Personal email message date? April 29, May 1, 3, 2016.
63 Hays to Godwin, 1 March 1796. MH 0015, Pforzheimer
Collection.
64 See Timothy Whelan’s two articles: “Mary Steele, Mary
Hays”, 511-512; and “Mary Hays and Henry Crabb Robinson,”
176-190.
65 Mary Hays, 30 Kirby Street, Hatton Garden, to William
Godwin, 25 Chalton Street, Somers Town, 13 October 1795. MH
0008, Pforzheimer Collection.52
twentieth century to chart a female intellectual tradition that
is now a global project.
Despite the ignorance, misinterpretation, distortion, and
intentional erasure, recovering Hays’s “female biography” is
most significant for what it can tell us about the growth of
her mind and the production of her works. She was generous to
other women, including Wollstonecraft, Fenwick and her nieces,
both with money and understanding. Commentators in her time and
ours have sometimes been less so with her, denying the
extensive body of work she produced whose importance we are
only now making the effort to understand. Too often, critics
make judgments based on atavistic prejudices about learned
women who wrestle with their own sexuality as a form of female
knowledge.67 The ongoing complexity of reclaiming Hays on her
own terms is exemplified in a postscript to a letter to Godwin
in which she describes an evening party she attended the
previous night. She tells Godwin that one of the “Kantian
gentlemen” present pressed her to study the new work of
Immanuel Kant because, he said, “Like the Athenians, I was ever
thirsting after something new.”68 This points the way to a
deeper look into Hays’s philosophical connections within a
wider context beyond Godwin, Helvetius, Rousseau,
Wollstonecraft and other familiars. The revelations of female
biography, for both the biographer and her subject, endure.
66 I appreciate William N. West’s counsel, personal email message, June 14,2016.53
Endnotes
67 See, for example, Miriam L. Wallace’s reviews of two recent
works: Helena Bergmann’s A Revised Reading of Mary Hays’ Philosophical
Novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796): Enlarging the Canon of the Mary
Wollstonecraft Literary-Philosophical Circle; and Judith Thompson’s John
Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner. Miriam L. Wallace,
The BARS Review, 43 (2013): n.p. < http://www.bars.ac.uk/>. Okay
as changed?.
68 Mary Hays, [Little John Street?], to William Godwin, 25
Chalton Street, Somers Town, 23 March 1796. MH 0018,
Pforzheimer Collection.
54