The novel’s main character is Mary Raymond and follows her throughout her life to show the trials and tribulations that she is forced to face because of her “rank” in society.
As she ventures from the Edenic safety of the estate and as she grows older, Mary seems to be haunted by Sir Peter Osborne who continuously appears in her life at her most vulnerable moments.
The controversy wasn’t just for depicting reality, but also because of the focus the novel puts on the role that man-made laws played in creating these political and social issues for women at the time.
She can’t even make him pay in the court of public opinion because his status as a male landowner and society's prejudice against women will lead to them taking his side in a ‘he said she said’ situation.
The novel opens with the narrator Mary Raymond writing an account of her life from prison with a plea for God's mercy and for the reader to acknowledge her position as an innocent victim of misfortune.
She leads a happy and healthy childhood doing things like bareback horse riding, tree climbing, wrestling other children, and dancing.
She is rescued and when she realizes that Sir Osborne is her rescuer, she is terrified and begs him not to feel entitled to treat her with "insult"[2] and allow her to the Neville home in peace, which he does.
He becomes offended when Mary explains why her guardian separated them.Mary writes a letter to Mr. Raymond stating that she loves William but will renounce him if she deems it the virtuous thing to do.
Mr. Raymond dies, leaving Mary only a letter of introduction for a position assisting in managing the home of a friend and his wife in London.
Mary travels to London and arrives at her destination, only to find the job offer was a ruse when Osborne enters her room that night.
Mary eventually takes the key from the maid attending to her and begins to escape until she gets caught on the stairway by a drunken Osborne and he assaults her.
Mary recounts again what has happened since her arrival in the city, and the landlady offers the service of her husband in seeking legal redress, but warns that her case would be difficult to prove in court.
He claims love for her and regret for his actions, saying that he will give her a future and affluence, an offer she vehemently refuses and he leaves her to the processes of the law.
Six months later, Mary is in the village after getting a loan from the bank for the farm, she encounters Osborne and his hunting party again while she is caring for an injured child, and he prevents her from stumbling in shock.
He tells her the next morning he will be leaving to take a months-long voyage to the western islands and hopes by his return she will reconsider.
[4] Her first novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) focused on female sexuality and desire, its been suggested it was an autobiographical account of her romantic interest in William Frend.
Hays was ridiculed widely by the mainstream male intelligentsia for both her novel and association with Wollstonecraft, inspiring much of the work of cataloguing injustice in Victim of Prejudice.
This viewpoint gives William a paradoxical view of Mary’s assault and ultimately leaves him unable to do anything to help his friend.
Throughout the novel, Mary Raymond is introduced to and found violating 18th-century English social norms, specifically regarding chastity and gender identities.
Scholar Brittany Barron argues that this moment marks the shift from Mary’s idyllic childhood seclusion to her entrance into a patriarchal society.
Throughout The Victim of Prejudice, Mary consistently asserts her desire to be an autonomous, fully functioning member of society, wanting to “seek, by honest labour, the bread of independence”.
As the illegitimate offspring of a prostitute and murderer she is not free to marry who she chooses, nor is she allowed to enter honestly into society without facing bouts of prejudice.
“As Hays observed in her Letters and Essays, ‘young women without fortunes, if they do not chance to marry have scarce any other resource than in servitude or prostitution’”.
[2] While Mary has sections of the novel —such as her childhood with Mr. Raymond, where she enjoys greater freedom, as scholar Sandra Sherman puts it, “From Hays's ironic perspective, women's approach to autonomy is circular”.
[5] To this point, scholars suggest that “this dualism is often gendered and hierarchized so that women are associated with the body, while men are linked to the mind or reason" (Ty qtd.
[7] Mary is set up as a contradiction to these norms of labeling as she is taught to reason by Mr Raymond and “trusts his wisdom above her own, acquiescing to … conventions that subordinate her based on her sex”.
[2] She consistently makes the effort to maintain this in her own life, but after being raped, she discovers that society will not grant her an association with reason.
[2] One of the primary components of The Victim of Prejudice is the idea of trauma and the seemingly cyclical, fate-like way it impacts women, especially in a patriarchal-centered society.
Her dying groans and reiterated warnings, in low, tremulous accents, continued to vibrate on my ear.” With this Hays expands on the idea of the cyclical nature of trauma when it is suggested that Mary will reinvent the cycle, “I recovered, as from a frightful dream, to recollection and sanity”.
[4] Ty claims that after her rape “Mary Raymond longs to be free of her sexuality” drawing connections between social actions and bodily consequences.