Abstract
Mary Hays (1759–1843) was a devoted religious Dissenter who published in a variety of genres (poetry, fiction, periodical essays, women’s biography, and historical works) for diverse audiences between 1781 and 1821. Her early novels were marked by sensibility and feminist ideals gained through her wide reading and close friendships with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; her later work consisted of historical works for young readers, moral and didactic fiction, and women’s biography.
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References
Adams, M. Ray. 1940. “Mary Hays, Disciple of William Godwin.” PLMA 55 (June): 472-83.
Bergmann, Helena. 2011. A Revised Reading of Mary Hays’ Philosophical Novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney: Enlarging the Canon of the Mary Wollstonecraft Literary-Philosophical Circle. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Brooks, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
———. 2004. The Correspondence (1779-1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist. Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press.
Fletcher, Loraine. 1996. “Four Jacobin Women Novelists.” In Writing and Radicalism, edited by John Lucas, 102-27. London: Longman.
Kell, E. 1844. “Memoir of Mary Hays: With Some Unpublished Letters addressed to her by Robert Robinson, of Cambridge, and Others.” Christian Reformer 11 (September): 813-20.
Rajan, Tilottama. 1993. “Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney.” Romanticism 32 (2): 149-76.
Rogers, Katherine. 1987. “The Contribution of Mary Hays.” Prose Studies 10 (2): 131-42.
Spongberg, Mary. 2010. “Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft and the Evolution of Dissenting Feminism.” Enlightenment and Dissent 26: 230-58.
Tompkins, J. M. S. “Mary Hays, Philosophess.” The Polite Marriage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1938. 150-87.
Ty, Eleanor, ed. 1995. The Victim of Prejudice. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
———, ed. 2009. Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walker, Gina Luria. 2006a. Mary Hays (1759-1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate.
———, ed. 2006b. The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
———, ed. 2013-14. Female Biography; Or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women. 6 vols. Chawton House Library Edition. London: Pickering & Chatto.
Wallace, Miriam L. 2009. “Writing Lives and Gendering History in Mary Hays’s Female Biography (1803).” In Romantic Autobiography in England, edited by Eugene Stelzig, 63-78. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
Wedd, Anne F., ed. 1925. Love-Letters of Mary Hays (1779-1780). London: Methuen.
Whelan, Timothy. 2015a. “Mary Hays and Henry Crabb Robinson.” The Wordsworth Circle 46 (3): 176-90.
———. 2015b. “Mary Steele, Mary Hays and the Convergence of Women’s Literary Circles in the 1790s.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38 (4): 511-24.
———. 2019. “Mary Hays and Dissenting Culture, 1770-1810.” The Wordsworth Circle 50 (3): 318-47.
Further Reading
Brooks, Marilyn. 1995. “Mary Hays: Finding a Voice in Dissent.” Enlightenment and Dissent 14: 3–24.
———. 2008. “Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice: Chastity Renegotiated.” Women’s Writing 15 (1): 13–31.
Green, Georgina. 2007. “Fiction and Autobiography in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796).” Literature Compass 4 (3): 709–20.
James, Felicity. 2012. “Writing Female Biography: Mary Hays and the Life-Writing of Religious Dissent.” In Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850, edited by Daniel Cook and Amy Culley, 117–32. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Murray, Julie. 2013. “Mary Hays and the Forms of Life.” Studies in Romanticism 52 (Spring): 61–84.
Pollin, Burton R. 1971. “Mary Hays on Women’s Rights in the Monthly Magazine.” Etudes Anglaises 24 (3): 271–82.
Sharma, Anjana. 2001. “A Different Voice: Mary Hays’s The Memoirs of Emma Courtney.” Women’s Writing 8 (1): 139–68.
Ty, Eleanor. 1993. Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Walker, Gina Luria. 2004. “Mary Hays (1759-1843): An Enlightened Quest.” In Women, Gender, and Enlightenment: A Comparative History, edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, 493–518. Houndsmill, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2010. “Energetic Sympathies of Truth and Feeling: Mary Hays and Rational Dissent.” Enlightenment and Dissent 26: 259–85.
———. 2018. “I sought and made myself an extraordinary destiny.” Women’s Writing 25 (2): 124–49.
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Whelan, T. (2023). Hays, Mary. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_92-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_92-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_92-1