1 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION The

1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION The Chawton House Library Edition of Mary Hays’s Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries: Alphabetically Arranged (‘CHLE’) is the first modern scholarly edition since its original publication in 1803. When it appeared, Female Biography was the first history of women since Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies (1405), the first in English, and the first compendium of women by either male or female compilers since Thomas Hewyood’s Generall Historie of Women (1624, 1657) to include rebellious and impious figures, as well as learned ones. No notice was taken of the first two accomplishments, but the presence of ‘vicious and defective traits of several females’ in Female Biography caused much public and private consternation. Two hundred years later, this new edition celebrates Hays as a femme philosophe in her own right and Female Biography for its unique place in women’s history, as the first Enlightenment encyclopedia in English by, for, and about female readers, and as Hays’s major work. It is a propitious moment to produce CHLE. Like most ‘learned ladies’ through time, Hays was an autodidact, without the classical training of her male contemporaries. In the ‘Preface’ to Female Biography, she reports that working alone she compiled the 300 entries in three years. As a consequence, some of the entries include multiple women, or confuse several women, or perpetuate imaginary figures, or are simply wrong – and therein hang some editorial tales. By contrast to Hays’s solitary efforts, at this writing the new edition is the achievement of more than 150 scholars and researchers, representing 104 institutions in eighteen countries and four continents. Many of the participating scholars are specialists in the figures Hays included, or the female networks in the period in which a woman was active, or in the emerging scholarship on a woman’s ‘career’ as queen, composer, politician, scientist, warrior, martyr, courtesan, prophetess, philosopher, linguist, writer, or ‘learned lady’, a category of special interest to Hays. We are able to enhance each of the ‘female biographies’ for the contemporary reader by drawing on the critical mass of feminist historical scholarship generated over the past 50 years. This is an unprecedented opportunity to reclaim Hays’s text and burnish it with new information. 1 2 The edition calls attention to Hays’s ambitious design for her six volumes: that is, to address the conspicuous absence of women in the catalogues by major Enlightenment philosophes that recorded the lineage of almost exclusively male thinkers and their contributions to canonical knowledge. Following the model developed by Pierre Bayle in his provocative Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), Hays experimented with varieties of ‘female biography’ – the stories of real women’s experiences, when possible, told in their own words – as a new category of historical analysis. Hays exploited the Enlightenment imperative for empirical evidence to address the persistence of misogyny and the denial of women’s achievements. Female Biography attests to the existence of active, learned, and powerful women who produced new knowledge and made genuine, if unheralded, contributions to cultural capital. CHLE honors Hays’s pioneering method, the extraordinary scope of her sources, and the correctives she attempts to traditional narratives to reveal an alternative human history. CHLE places Hays in her appropriate contexts, as Rational Dissenter and Unitarian, pedagogue, feminist biographer, experimental novelist, and Enlightenment innovator.1 Her own ‘female biography’, particularly her damaged reputation by the turn of the century, reflects and refracts the climate of opinion in the years leading up to and following publication of Female Biography. In December, 1798, the liberal Monthly Magazine announced that Mary Hays, a frequent contributor, had embarked on a ‘biographical work of great and lasting interest to the female world, to contain the lives of illustrious women, of all ages and nations.’ The ambitious undertaking was commissioned by publishing entrepreneur Richard Phillips as part of his aggressive strategy to dominate the booming market for biography and other forms of life- writing. Female Biography was published in six volumes in December 1802, and immediately unleashed strong reactions. Hays’s unfortunate status colored private, as well as public, criticism. Among the busy pens, on 27 January 1803, Lucy Aikin, the niece of distinguished poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, asked for her correspondent’s view of Hays’s ‘singular work’. Aikin identified Hays as ‘a great disciple of Mrs. Godwin, you know, and a zealous stickler for the equal rights and equal talents of our sex with the other.’ Too impatient to wait for an answer, Aikin advised that Hays had sabotaged Female Biography by selecting role models readers would likely find disturbing: 2 3 At the same time as [Hays] attempts to make us despise ‘the frivolous rivalry of beauty and fashion, [Aikin advised] she holds forth such tremendous examples of the excesses of more energetic characters, that one is much inclined to imitate those quiet, good folks who bless God they are no geniuses.2 Aikin worried that Hays’s ‘female biographies’ would reinforce male readers’ aversion to learned women. Alas, alas! [Aikin continued] though Miss Hayes has wisely addressed herself to the ladies alone, I am afraid the gentlemen will get a peep at her book and repeat with tenfold energy that women have no business with anything but nursing children and mending stockings. I do not think her book is written quite in an edifying manner neither – the morals are too French for my taste.3 Concern about ‘French’ morals was realistic in the repressive climate of opinion: since the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, and now, with the British public’s fears of invasion by Napoleon’s forces, Prime Minister Pitt the Younger’s cold war against British radicals like Hays was reflected in increasing gender conservatism. Aikin went on to write a very different sort of women’s history several years after the appearance of Female Biography, but clearly influenced by it. Aikin expressed a familial point of view. In 1804, Aikin’s aunt, Anna Barbauld rejected Maria Edgeworth’s invitation to collaborate with her on a ‘periodical paper, to be written entirely by ladies’, that Edgeworth assured Barbauld ‘would succeed.’ Edgeworth encouraged Barbauld to join her and ‘all the literary ladies’ in the venture. Barbauld echoed and complicated her niece’s reaction: ‘All the literary ladies! Mercy on us!’ she famously replied. There is no bond of union among literary women, any more than among literary men; different sentiments and different connections separate them much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them. Mrs. Hannah More would not write along with you or me, and we should probably hesitate at joining Miss Hays, or if she were living, Mrs. Godwin.4 Barbauld had called on Hays in August 1802, likely to discuss Hays’s use of Barbauld’s recent obituary of Hester Chapone, one of the few contemporary figures in Female Biography.5 Now Barbauld invoked the textual ‘women’s war’ that paralleled international conflict: female writers across the political spectrum did make common cause on the great issues of their lives – improvements in ‘female education’, the imbalance in gender dynamics, and the inequity of the double standard for moral reputation. But so strong was the pull of John Bull conservatism -- 3 4 represented by the redoubtable Hannah More and her denunciation of the ‘French principles’ espoused by Wollstonecraft and Hays -- that even privately shared bonds had to be repudiated. Female Biography was widely reviewed in England, France, and America. Critics agreed to the enormity of the task. But, except in periodicals with the most progressive readership, reviewers expressed grave doubts about Hays’s principles of selection. The Critical Review6 offered an historical frame: ‘Many are the disputes’, the critic wrote, ‘which have been agitated concerning the comparative superiority or inferiority of the two sexes; in the course of which, the disputants have generally appeared to us too warm and too eager in their partialities, to admit a suitable compromise, or appeal, from theory and romance, to experience and the evidence of facts.’ The Renaissance querelle des femmes had morphed into the hotly debated ‘l’égalite de les sexes.’ In her entry for Elizabeth Bury, Hays refers to Bury’s conviction ‘that the mind was of no sex.’7 Hays was among the last standing outspoken proponents of intellectual equality. ‘The work before us’, he continued, ‘has been compiled to counteract the contempt in which some yet hold the female mind and in this intention it cannot fail to produce a powerful diversion in favour of the latter. Here, indeed, are ample materials, by which contending opinions may be repelled or confirmed. Those who exalt the capacity of the fair sex must expect to be asked for proofs; and what more striking than a body of evidence, which comprehends the characters and actions of the most illustrious women of all nations? For producing such a testimony, Miss Hays will probably receive the thanks of her sex; and, although we shall have occasion to produce some objections of considerable weight, we cannot, upon the whole, deny her the praise of much laudable zeal and industry.’ Despite the moral handwringing, the six volume sets sold so well that by September 1804 Hays reported to Henry Crabb Robinson she had been able to purchase a little ‘cabin’ of her own in Camberwell, outside London. Another marker of Female Biography's commercial success was the set presented to Lady Elizabeth Austen Knight as an anniversary gift by her oldest son in December 1805, which took its place in the family’s library at their manor at Godmersham.

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