“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