Mary Hays

Edition: The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford World's Classics, 1996) 

The Victim of Prejudice (Broadview Press) [Multiple copies]

Criticism: 

Barker-Benfield, G. J., ‘Wollstonecraft, Hays, and the Conflict over Sensibility’, in The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1992), 359368

Jones, Vivien, ‘The Tyranny of the Passions’: Feminism and Heterosexuality in the Fiction of Wollstonecraft and Hays’, in Sally Ledger and Jane Spencer (eds), Political Gender: Texts and Contexts (London: Harvester, 1984), 173-88

Kelly, Gary, ‘Mary Hays and Revolutionary Sensibility’ in Women, Writing and Revolution: 1790-1827 (1993), pp. 80-125

Tilottama Rajan, 'Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays', Studies in Romanticism, 32 (1993), 146-76.

Rogers, Katherine, ‘The Contribution of Mary Hays’, Prose Studies, 10 (1987), 131-42

Sherman, Sandra, ‘The Law, Confinement, and Disruptive Excess in Hays’ The Victim of Prejudice’, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol 5 (NY, AMS Press, 1998) 

Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)

Ty, Eleanor, ‘Breaking the "Magic Circle": From Repression to Effusion in Memoirs of Emma Courtney, in Ty, Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790's (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993) [short loan]

Ty, Eleanor, ‘The Mother and Daughter: The Dangers of Replication in The Victim of Prejudice’, in Ty, Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790's (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993) [short loan]

Ty, Eleanor, ‘The Imprisoned Female Body in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice’, in Lang-Peralta, Linda ed., Women Revolution and the Novels of the 1790s (1999)

Wallace, Miriam L., ‘Mary Hays’s "female philosopher": Constructing Revolutionary Subjects’, in Craciun, Adriana and Kari E. Lokke, Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 233-260

Watson, Nicola, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (1994) Explores the clash between radicals and reactionaries on the issue of sensibility. Reading and Writing letters in novels, Watson argues, are metonyms for female desire, and for revolution. Watson discusses how letters go astray, are gendered, circulate beyond control, and require formal writing in a revolutionary age. The study does not really discuss the ‘form’ of the novel, concentrating instead on the letter as a trope. Covers Austen, Scott, Edgeworth and others.

Online Material

Selected Bibliography by Eleanor Ty

Eleanor Ty's Mary Hays Website: contains a biographical critical essay, links to other radicals of the period, and excerpts from Hays's letters. 

References to Hays in Richard Polwhele's poem 'The Unsex'd Females'

A fragment from From Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous, by Mary Hays 1793 (U. Penn.)