Jff..ary J{ays

(1760-1843)

Friend and disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Mary Hays was born in Southwark, London, into a family of middle-class radical dis­ senters. Soon after her father's death in r777, Hays fell in love with her neighbor and mentor, John Eccles, and he with her; but in r780, after over­ coming his family's objections and shortly before they were to be married, he died of a fever.1 To assuage her grief, she turned to intensive reading of novels, poetry, history, philosophy, and theology. In r788 Hays heard a sermon given by the rational dissenter Robert Robin­ son and began a correspondence that eventually led to his becoming her close friend and adviser; he not only gave her recommendations for reading but drew her out of her unhappy isolation and into a nonconformist circle that included his disciples, George Dyer and William Frend. Although she had published poetry and some fiction, she attracted considerable attention with her first book, Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (r792), a response to Gilbert Wakefield's attack on dissenting public worship and a defense of nonconformist practices, which she published under the pseudonym Eusebia just after Robinson's death. Hays had written but not yet published her Appeal to the Men of Great Brit­ ain in Behalf of Women when she read Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (r792). She wrote appreciatively to Wollstonecraft, and the two met at the home of the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Soon after a breakfast together, Hays wrote, "This lady appears to me to possess the sort of genius which Lavater calls the one to ten million. Her conversation, like her writings, is brilliant, forcible, instructive and entertaining. She is the true disciple of her own system, and commands at once fear and reverence, admiration and esteem." 2 At about this time, Hays became acquainted with

1. Her love letters were published in London in 1925 by her great-great-niece A. F. Wedd as The Love-Letters ef Mary Hays (1779-1780). 2. Ibid., 5.

268 Mary Hays other members ofJoseph Johnson's circle of artists, philosophers, and writers, includingThotnas Payne, William Blake, William Godwin, and Thomas Hol­ croft. In 1793, having benefited from Wollstonecraft's suggestions, Hays pub­ lished Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous, discussing materialism, Uni­ tarianism, republicanism, and feminism. The English Review savaged it. Even so, in 1795 Hays decided to make writing her career and left her widowed mother's home to embark on an independent life at 30 Kirby Street, Hatton Garden. During this period she wrote for the Critical Review, began a study of mathematics, and penned sermons to be delivered by Dr. Disney of Essex Street Chapel. She also fell in love with William Frend, only to be painfully disappointed when he made clear that the feeling was not mutual. William Godwin became her mentor at about this time and suggested that she try her hand at fiction. The result was Memoirs ef Emma Courtney, published by Godwin's friend George Robinson in November 1796. An auto­ biographical, feminist novel, it shocked contemporary audiences with its honest portrayal of female sexual desire. Hays's friendship with Godwin and her unrequited love affair with Frend figure prominently in the plot, and because the real-life identities of the characters are only thinly disguised, the book was the subject of much talk. An epistolary novel, it quotes real letters to Hays from Godwin, called "Mr. Francis" in the story; William Frend ap­ pears as Augustus Harley. The Monthly Review said that Hays displayed "great intellectual powers," the European Magazine called it "a work of extraordinary merit, from the perusal of which much moral benefit, ifproperly understood, may flow," while the Anti-Jacobin Review, predictably, ridiculed it.3 Hays was also writing for the Monthly Magazine in 1796 and 1797, at one point defend­ ing Godwin, at another joining in the debate concerning women's education, arguing for women's intellectual equality. When Mary Wollstonecraft returned from two years on the Continent, Hays renewed their friendship and reintroduced Wollstonecraft to Godwin. The romance that then ensued between her two friends irrevocably altered both of their lives. Ironically, Hays's radical ideas were being attacked by Elizabeth Hamilton, Richard Polwhele, S. T. Coleridge, the Anti-Jacobin, and others at about the same time that she was urging her even more radical friends, Wollstonecraft and Godwin, to do the conventional thing and marry. Hays was with Wollstonecraft during her last illness and wrote some of the letters announcing her death. By 1799, when Joseph Johnson brought out Hays's second novel, the Vic-

3. Monthly Review, n.s., 22 (1797): 449; European Magazine 31 (1797): 34; Anti:facobm Review 3 (May 1799): 54-58. 270 Mary Hays

tim of Prejudice, written, she said, "to delineate the mischiefs that have ensued from the too great stress laid on the reputation for chastity in woman," her feminist and Jacobin stance had become intensely unpopular, and the book met with ridicule and anger. In his Reminiscences, Robinson describes Hays at this time as "a very zealous political and moral reformer," who professed Mary Wollstonecraft's opinions "with more zeal than discretion. This brought her into disrepute with the rigid, and her character suffered, but most unde­ servedly. Whatever her principles might have been, her conduct was rigidly correct." 4 Coleridge was not so kind. He told Southey, "Of Miss Hayes' intel­ lect I do not think so highly as you, or rather, to speak sincerely, I think not contemptuously but certainly despectively thereof. Yet I think you likely in this case to have judged better than I; for to hear a thing, ugly and petticoated, ex-syllogize a God with cold-blooded precision, and attempt to run religion through the body with an icicle, an icicle from a Scotch Hog-trough! I do not endure it; my eye beholds phantoms, and 'nothing is but what is not.'" 5 Despite Coleridge's opinion, Hays and Southey remained good friends for many years, and in 1814 there was a plan for Hays to live with Southey's family in Keswick. The same cannot be said for her friendship with Godwin, which cooled in 1800, possibly because of his remarriage. Later, when Charles Lloyd, who had ridiculed her in his novel Edmund Oliver (1798), sent the rumour abroad that Hays, in the manner of Emma Courtney, had offered herself to him, she became the talk of London and retreated from public view. Elizabeth Hamilton satirized her in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) as Bridgetina Botherim. Hays published Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Cele­ brated Women of all Ages and Countries in six volumes in 1803. This record of women's achievement in Greece, Rome, Britain, and Europe was popular in both England and America and is the work for which Hays was remembered in the latter part of the nineteenth century. By 1814 she was living in Hot Wells, Clifton, had become an admirer of Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More, and was writing evangelical tracts for the poor, such as Family Annals, or, the Sisters (1817). She was eighty-three when she died in 1843.

MAJOR WORKS: Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (London, 1792); Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women; Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (London, 1793); Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 2 vols. (London, 1796); The Victim of Prejudice, 2 vols. (London, 1799); Female Biog-

4. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London, 1938),1:5. 5. Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Boston, 1895), I :323. Mary Hays raphy; or, Memoirs ef Illustrious and Celebrated Women ef all Ages and Countries, 6 vols. (London, r803); Family Annals, or, the Sisters (London, 1817).

TEXTS USED: Text of "Invocation to the Nightingale" from The Lady's Poetical Maga­ zine, or, Beauties ef British Poetry, ed. (James Harrison] , 4 vols. (London, 1781-82), 2:464-65. Text of "Ode to Her Bullfinch" from Universal Magazine 77 (December 1785): 329.

Invocation to the Nightingale

Wand'ring o'er the dewy meadow, Oft at ev'ning hour I go; Fondly courting Philomela's Sympathetick plaints of woe.

Sometimes, hush'd in still attention, Leaning pensive o'er a stile, Fancy bids her sound delusive Lull the yielding sense awhile.

Soft the visionary musick, Rising fl.oats upon the gale: IO Now it sinks in strains more languid, Dying o'er the distant vale.

Starting from the dream of fancy, Nought my list'ning ear invades, Save the hum of falling waters, Save the rustling aspin-shade.

"Little songstress, soothe my sorrows, "Wrap my soul in softest airs; "Such as erst, in Lydian measures, "Charm'd the Grecian hero's cares. 20

3 Philomela] In classical mythology, the nightingale. Mary Hays

"But, if forc'd by cruel rusticks "To lament thy ruin'd care; "Breathe thy saddest strains of anguish, "Strains that melodize despair.

"Deeply vers'd in Sorrow's lessons, "Best my heart thy griefs can know; "Pity dwells within the bosom "Soften'd by an equal woe.

"While thy melancholy plainings 30 "All my hapless fate renew, "Heart-felt sighs shall load the zephyrs, "Tears increase the falling dew.

"Cease to shun me, lovely mourner; "Sweetly breathe the melting strain: "Oft thou deign'st to charm the rustick, "Roving thoughtless o'er the plain.

"Yet, to him, thy softest trillings "Can no sympathy impart; "Wouldst thou seek for kindred feelings, 40 "See them trembling in my heart!"

Vain, alas! my Invocation, Vain the pleadings of the muse! Wrapp'd in silent shades, the charmer Doth her tuneful lay refuse.

Clouds obscure deform the ::ether, Rising damps involve the plain; Pensively I hasten homeward, To avoid the coming rain.*

*When Hays republished this poem in Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (London, r793), she added to the title the subtitle "Written near the New Forest in Hampshire" and revised the last stanza to read: "Homeward as I hopeless wander,/ Mary Hays 273

Faintly sighs the evening breeze;/ Shadowy beams the moon's pale lustre, / Glittering through the waving trees."

Ode to Her Bullfinch

Little wanton fl.utt'rer, say Whither wou'dst thou wing thy way? Why those airy circles make, All untry'd the thorny brake? Various dangers lurking lie In the guise of liberty; See the wily fowler laid Close beneath the hawthorn shade; Mark his tyrannous intent, Full on schemes of murder bent; IO For within that rugged breast Meek-ey'd Pity ne'er wou'd rest, Nor the softer powers of Love E'er that stoick heart could move, Little trembler, hither fly, In my bosom safely lie; Sympathy and tenderness Doth that bosom still possess; There thy glossy plumes unfold Plumes of azure and of gold; 20 While secure from every harm, Pining want and rude alarm, A willing captive still remain, Nor with thy liberty to gain.

Whisp'ring Nature prompts to fly, Seeking sweet society; Or the gentler voice of Love Bids thee range the mazy grove; Ah! thy fond intent forbear, Transient joys which end in care; All a parent's anxious woe 274 Mary Hays

Soon thy downy breast would know, Lest the school-boy's truant eye Shou'd thy tender young descry; Lest the ruder vernal storm Shou'd thy little nest deform, Hither then, thou wanton, fly, Bless thy soft captivity; And lull with notes of soothing sound 40 The pangs which do my bosom wound. (1785)