The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader
If you have ever read one of Mary Hays’s novels (The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796); Broadview Press, (2000); The Victim of Prejudice (1799), Broadview Press, (1996), and wondered where the author was coming from, this is the book for you. It contains substantial excerpts from her other writings, letters to and from Hays, and contemporary reviews of her works. It provides a reflection, through the life and work of a contemporary author, of the history and culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Hays was one of the first women writers in late eighteenth century England to write on political matters. Her first book (1791) was an answer to Gilbert Wakefield’s critique of the social worship of the Dissenters. Her second was Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793), which took on issues such as women’s education, separation of church and state, and materialism and necessity. She also wrote for the Monthly Magazine. Politically radical, Hays never abjured Christianity, using it, like Martin Luther King, Jr., as a means of holding the larger culture up to its own ideals.
It is obvious from her novels that Mary Hays was an early feminist. But she was also a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. She wrote An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1798) and a monumental, six-volume Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries (1803), covering 288 famous women. One constant theme in the materials collected here is the abuse any argumentative woman would reap in this period just for being a woman.
The influence of Rousseau and Helvetius on late eighteenth century British writers is well known. But Gina Walker has excavated other influences not as well known. One is the influence of Huguenot culture on English Dissent and on this writer in particular. Mary Hays was familiar with the writings of Pierre Bayle. One of her patrons was Robert Robinson, Dissenting preacher and writer who translated and transmitted the writings of Jacques Saurin and Jean Claude. As members of the persecuted Huguenots, it is not surprising that they made a virtue of tolerance, unlike, for example, Rousseau.
Hays was also familiar with the history of philosophy as mediated by such Christian writers as William Enfield and Joseph Priestley. She used this wide knowledge against the misogyny of Rousseau and some of her contemporaries.
The letters bring out the personal. Our sources seem to indicate that Mary Hays was rather plain, and her letters almost obsess with the issue. If the history of the influence of personal ugliness on culture (think Socrates, Sartre, etc.) is ever written, Mary Hays will have a place in it.
There are some nettles. Hays writes to Henry Crabb Robinson with great respect, and wants him at her funeral. A personal note in his handwriting describes her as “somewhat pedantic and rather ridiculous… The Author of Forgotten Works”. Poet Robert Southey describes her as “a woman of talents… I like and esteem her”, but “erroneous in all points of first importance”. How many of us know what our friends really think of us?
The foregoing review of pieces of this anthology cannot do justice to the depth and variety of materials here, which, together with introductions to the texts by the editor, amount to a critical biography of Mary Hays. They make an outstanding teaching tool. It will be harder now to assume that anything worthwhile in early feminism can be found in Mary Wollstonecraft. Here is one of her friends, but not a slavish imitator. Mary Hays has a voice of her own.
