Mary Hays

Mary Hays (1759–1843) was an autodidact intellectual who published essays, poetry, novels and several works on famous (and infamous) women.

Hays was described by those who disliked her as 'the baldest disciple of [Mary] Wollstonecraft' by The Anti Jacobin Magazine, attacked as an 'unsex'd female' by clergyman Robert Polwhele, and provoked controversy through her long life with her rebellious writings.

The backlash following Wollstonecraft's death and posthumous publication of her Memoirs impacted Hays' later work, which some scholars have called more conservative.

If Wollstonecraft was neglected through the nineteenth century, Hays and her writing received even less critical evaluation or academic attention until the twentieth-century's emerging feminist movement.

[5] Hays' early education is shaped by poetry, novels, and religious and political debates at the Dissenting meeting house.

[4] Subsequent early publications in periodical include two poems in 1785, and a short story, "Hermit: an Oriental Tale," published in 1786 and reprinted twice.

[citation needed] From 1782 to 1790, Hays met and exchanged letters with Robert Robinson, a minister who campaigned against the slave trade.

[1] Hays contacted the publisher of the book, Joseph Johnson, which led to her friendship with Wollstonecraft and involvement with London's Jacobin intellectual circle.

There is no known portrait of her in later life, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to her as "a thing ugly and petticoated" (although his real complaint was her arguing theology with him).

Her next novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799) is more emphatically feminist in its focus on women's secondary status and criticism of class hierarchies.

Others have argued that Hays had little to lose and did not include Wollstonecraft for other reasons—her stated reason that she was too recently dead, and because she had already written and published a full obituary that should perhaps be considered part of Female Biography.

Moving to Camberwell in 1804 thanks to the income from Female Biography, Hays became known to more literary figures of the time, including Charles and Mary Lamb and William Blake.

[12] Her letters are held at the New York Public Library, Astor and Tilden Foundation thanks to the work of Dr. Gina Luria Walker.