1 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION The

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.

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:

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 --

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. Recent scholarship suggests that Jane Austen, Lady Elizabeth's niece by marriage, probably consulted the six volumes during her extended visits to Godmersham where she worked in the library on revising and composing her novels.8

In 1807, an American edition in three volumes was published by the Philadelphia firm Byrch & Small, with Fry and Kammerer printers, perhaps on the advice of Dr. Joseph Priestley, Unitarian scientist and theologian, whose personal copy of Female Biography may have been used to set type. Priestley settled in Pennsylvania in 1794 in the aftershocks of the burning of his Birmingham home, library, and laboratories by an angry mob on Bastille Day, 1791. During his last years in London, Priestley was one of Hays’s dissenting mentors, and she may have continued to correspond with him, as she did with her cousin, Unitarian Benjamin Seymour, who knew Priestly in America.

Without fanfare, Female Biography quickly became the source for information about women’s lives, an unofficial Rosetta Stone for the many compendia about women that appeared through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Hays was rarely acknowledged as the original author of specific entries. Matilda Bentham (1776-1852), Coleridge’s protégée, who had competed with Hays to be the author of the first female compendium, and lost, made use of some of Hays’s entries in A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804). Sarah Josepha Hale, whose Woman’s Record: or Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from the Creation to A.D. 1854 (1853) dominated the field for decades, among others, replicated Hays’s ‘female biographies’. Over time, these successors achieved the moral pruning called for by Hays’s critics, the revolutionary subjects and perspectives of the work disappeared, and by the 1970s, Female Biography was relegated to the critical dust bin of ‘hack work.’

In her lifetime, Female Biography was the most successful of Hays’s publications, both for the monies it earned her, its shelf life, and its unacknowledged influence. Yet her author’s ‘Preface’, the figures selected, and the reach of her volumes attest to a more ambitious and subversive plan than either Lucy Aikin or Anna Barbauld or any of the contemporaneous reviewers or publisher Phillips realized. As well as a commercial undertaking, Female Biography was designed to be Hays’s magnum opus, her response to the international project to collect, calibrate, and communicate knowledge produced during the various national Enlightenments. The crowning glory of this impulse was the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres, published under the direction of Diderot and

6 d'Alembert, in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between 1751 and 1772. Its aim, in the words of editor Denis Diderot, was no less than ‘to change the way people think.’ During the 22 years of its production, more than 140 scholars contributed 74,000 articles, constituting a ‘society of men of letters.’ Hays’s work addressed the glaring absence of women in the catalogues by major Enlightenment philosophes which recorded the lineage of almost exclusively male thinkers and their contributions to human understanding. In her ‘Preface’, Hays reached back before the Encyclopedists and their optimistic project to codify all human knowledge. Instead, she conspicuously identified herself with Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) and his provocative Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Bayle’s Dictionary provided an intentionally controversial context for Female Biography: his strategy was to focus on individuals that had been ignored, written out, and misidentified as vehicles for correcting the perpetuation of historical mistakes based on ignorance, superstition, and fear. Bayle’s Dictionary teems with obscure figures, as well as his correctives about famous ones.

Bayle’s strategy in his entries and extensive footnotes suggested to Hays a way to rationalize her compendium of women. Who had been more criticized, ignored, trivialized, manipulated, and mistrusted through time than individual women? What cohort had been more deliberately slandered than females who dared to create stories about themselves in spite of the Christian imperative that each daughter of Eve be chaste, submissive, and still, and behave like every other? Individuating women was a crucial element of the situational feminism Hays had been developing with Wollstonecraft before the latter’s sudden death.

In addition, Hays adopted the Enlightenment intent of Bayle’s Dictionary. CHLE scholar Susannah Åkerman writes, in doing so, ‘Hays foresees a new woman who will free herself by thinking anew about her position in society by being inspired by all these female role models - who show that their roles are not to submit to preconceived opinions about a Christian woman's 9 role but to display the women's lives in their full variety.’ Mary Spongberg, CHLE History

Editor, points to the central role of biography and collective ‘lives’ in the ‘intellectual culture of Rational Dissent in the late eighteenth century.’ 10 Hays educated herself in the dissenting legacy of writing lives that perpetuated a separate history to provide real examples of courageous and

7 ethical men for the living to emulate. In Hays’s hands, this practice was transmuted into ‘female biography’, the stories of real women's experiences the vehicle to distinguish specific historical agents, assemble the surprising number of learned women, the new knowledge they produced, the linkages between and among them, and, to the extent the information was available, their actual contributions.

Hays had prepared for such a project. From her girlhood she determined to play a part in the compelling intellectual debates of her time. She trained herself for such engagement in the limited ways open to her: an autodidactic education through omnivorous reading; sustained correspondence with scholarly men; and strategic alliances within the beleaguered Rational Dissenting community. She knew she was neither pretty nor alluring; insecurity combined with a shy, hypersensitive, self-deprecating social manner, continued to plague her personal relationships. An annuity of £70 from her late father gave her a degree of independence. She seized the chance to write and publish wherever and whenever she could. Like her close associate Mary Wollstonecraft, by 1791, Hays demanded attention as one of the relatively11 ‘new genus’ of professional women writers.12

Hays’s career and the publications she produced are most accurately understood within the context of British Rational Dissent, which in its more radical forms stimulated inquiring women to learn, write, and address the severe disabilities of their status. Uniquely among her female contemporaries, Hays’s published and private texts join religious and political dissent to concerns of gender. Hays suffered from the reflexive gender anxiety of some Rational Dissenters, female and male. She confronted the historical exclusion of women from the dissenting academies. Yet she also discerned the pro woman sympathies of prominent Dissenters, and took advantage of their receptivity to her passion to learn to make opportunities for herself. As a result of her immersion in dissenting print culture and pedagogy, Hays was one of the late Enlightenment female thinkers to explore the possibility that Rational Dissent, to date solidly male, had potential to become something more inclusive and more radical, that its optimistic view of human nature, its commitment to theological inquiry, its willingness to tolerate heterodoxy, and its profound belief in progressive education gestured toward a new kind of human equality and freedom: enlightened feminism.

Christianity offered access to learning; religion buoyed Hays’s ambitions, once she discovered that writing offered freedoms that even romantic love could not provide. Through her girlhood, listening to sermons that extolled God's command ‘to add knowledge to all other Christian virtues’,13 Hays came to see the search for enlightenment as a legitimate exercise in the ongoing progress of the Christian pilgrim. Although they did not meet until years later, in her earliest literary text, the manuscript volume of ‘Love-Letters’ (1783) she exchanged with her young Baptist lover, Hays’s concerns paralleled Wollstonecraft’s in her first novel, Mary; A Fiction (1788): improve woman's condition through the realistic portrayal of its confines. Like Wollstonecraft, Hays discerned that feminine sexuality was an authentic, if dangerous, form of knowledge. More than a decade before she read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Hays intuited the presence of a separate, sequestered community of women in which she participated, but from which she yearned to take distance.

Hays chose as her first dissenting mentor iconoclastic Baptist minister Robert Robinson (1735- 1790). Robinson embodied the dissenting commitment to the right to private judgment, and its corollary, ‘universal toleration.’ Robinson was a grassroots activist in Cambridge, and took part in national parliamentary debate and elections, demonstrating how belief could influence politics. Robinson introduced Hays to Radical Enlightenment thinkers, including Jacques Saurin (1677-1730), and Jean Claude (1619-1687), Huguenots of Le Refuge, whose works he translated from the French. In their meetings and correspondence from 1782 to his death in 1790, Robinson provided copies of his published works and responded seriously to Hays’s theological and philosophical inquiries, while fostering her independence

Robinson was an autodidact who built upon a few years of early schooling in Latin and French to produce a substantial body of publications that engaged with the most controversial issues and advanced learning of his time. Trained by Robinson in the virtues of heterodoxy, Hays cut her Nonconformist teeth on books he gave her. Hays would have read with especial attention Robinson’s translation of Saurin’s sermon ‘On the Repentance of the Unchaste Woman’, in which Saurin thinks through the woman’s experience, and asks, ‘What idea must a woman form of herself, if she have committed this crime; and considers it in its true point of light?’ Robinson’s influential sermon, Slavery Inconsistent with the Spirit of Christianity (1786, 1788), called for every Christian to take action to obliterate depraved passions produced by the desire to

9 enslave others. Robinson linked sensibility and reason to individual agency. Hays incorporated Robinson’s strategy in her evolving faith and feminism.

Robinson died in June 1790 while on a preaching visit to Joseph Priestley’s meeting houses in Birmingham and was buried there. In his eulogy, Priestley praised Robinson for his determination to educate his daughters as he did his sons, teaching them learned and modern languages himself, engaging tutors to instruct them in mathematics and philosophy.14 Priestley called attention to Robinson’s egalitarian vision of human potential that at birth all human beings have an equal capacity to learn and his determination to resist gender prejudice: ‘Certainly’, Priestly affirmed, ‘the minds of women are capable of the same improvement, and the same furniture as that of men, and it is of importance that, when they have leisure, they should have the same resources in reading, and the same power of instructing the world by writing, that men have.’

During 1791, Hays professed Unitarianism15 and popular, albeit controversial, tutor Gilbert Wakefield left New College Hackney. Late in the year Wakefield published An Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship, an incendiary pamphlet attacking the religious practices at New College. Wakefield wrote for a learned male audience and assumed his readers’ fluency in Greek and Latin. Wakefield declared that communal worship was a dilution of true religious devotion.16 Hays was the first to react to Wakefield in Cursory Remarks (1791) in which she announced the direction of her career by writing as ‘Eusebia’, the Greek word for ‘piety’, with connection to the historical roots of Unitarianism, and likely to suggest to readers the ‘good Eusebia’ in William Law’s popular and influential A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). Her rebuttal offered a glint of irony: ‘Should Mr. Wakefield take the trouble of perusing the following pages’, she began, ‘he will probably charge the writer with great presumption; a woman, young, unlearned, unacquainted with any language but her own; possessing no other merit than a love of truth and virtue, an ardent desire of knowledge, and a heart susceptible to the affecting and elevated emotions afforded by a pure and rational devotion.’17

Wakefield published a second edition in which he addressed his several challengers, including Anna Barbauld18 and Joseph Priestley, focusing on Eusebia as one of the ‘Amazonian auxiliaries’ that had attacked him. Wakefield assumed that Eusebia was a man hiding behind the identity of a woman. In his published rejoinder, Wakefield deflected the prospect of intellectual battle with a female impersonator to that of a sexual encounter, expressing mock awe at confronting ‘so mysterious an adversary’, and quoting from the Book of Proverbs, ‘THE WAY OF A MAN WITH A MAID.’19 Wakefield’s tactic pointed to the novelty of a female presence in religious disputes and his lack of experience in addressing a female critic. Hays solemnly replied to Wakefield in her second edition, admitting that his ‘ludicrous sally’ had offended her, correctly pointing out that he had not addressed the substance of her comments.20 She described herself as ‘abashed and wounded’, unequal to the strident demands of public debate with him.

Unitarians rallied around Hays. She received a letter from Cambridge mathematician and Unitarian William Frend (1757-1841), praising her pamphlet, and appealing to her to continue as peacemaker between sectarian men, for ‘the aid of the fair sex’ might be needed again ‘to soften the animosity and fervor of disputation.’21 He judged that as a studious, plain woman known to many of his associates, Eusebia would expect only intellectual exchanges with him, too. This was a serious, if understandable, misjudgment, and so the plot for the explosive narrative of Hays’s later autobiographical fiction, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, was set in motion.

Cursory Remarks brought Hays increased acceptance among London Rational Dissenters. She regularly attended Essex Street, the first avowedly Unitarian chapel. Hays attempted a small salon at her mother’s home to which she invited Frend on his visits from Cambridge, Dyer, the Disneys, the Lindsays, and the Worthingtons. Hays continued to advance her educational aspirations under the guidance of leading Dissenting philosophes, all of whom were involved as tutors, supporters, and defenders of New College.

Free inquiry was the engine that fueled New College. Hays studied on her own, attended sermons, and read tutors’ lectures. She read tutor William Enfield’s adaptation from the Latin of Jakob Brucker’s magisterial History of Philosophy (1742–44) published in 1791. Hays was now

11 able to study the history of ideas from the ancients to the moderns in English and assess the absence of women in this system. She read Priestley’s edition of Anthony Collins’s A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1790) and his abridgement of David Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principles of the Association of Ideas (1749, 1791). Hays found rationale for her pedagogical convictions in Priestley’s Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life. With Plans of Lectures (1765, 1788). She was introduced to Priestley, read many of his works, heard him preach at the Gravel Pit Meeting, and saw him in company with Dyer and Frend before his remove to America in 1794.22 John Disney provided her with books including The Life of Thomas Hollis (1780) by Francis Blackburne, an extreme Latitudinarian whose ‘Memoir’ of Hollis was pro-American and with a reform agenda; Priestley’s An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity (1770); and Disney’s life of his Cambridge tutor, John Jebb.23

Hays initiated contact with Hugh Worthington after hearing him preach at Salter’s Hall.24 Worthington, a former tutor in Classics and Logic at New College, encouraged Hays’s advanced study of Lavater’s theories of physiognomy, French, and mathematics, especially geometry, as key to scientific knowledge.25 Worthington urged Hays to teach and instruct others on the basis of her performance in Cursory Remarks. She replied quickly with short pieces she had already written that she deemed ‘more affecting’ than fiction because they were ‘drawn from truth.’26The culmination of this phase of Hays’s career was Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (1793), a primer on Rational Dissent for women, with a dedication to John Disney. Hays broke new ground by appropriating the female conduct book that hectored women, transforming it into a vehicle for instructional curricula for them, adapted from the male education at New College.

The book also reflected Mary Wollstonecraft’s political feminism. Poet George Dyer gave Hays a copy of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in June 1792. Hays read the book, marking passages in her excitement, handed it on to her younger sister Elizabeth, then quickly wrote to request a meeting with Wollstonecraft. The two breakfasted together soon after at Wollstonecraft’s rooms in Store Street. When they met Hays asked Wollstonecraft, as a seasoned editor at the Analytical Review and published writer, to review a draft of the introduction to Letters and Essays. Wollstonecraft sent Hays her comments on the piece which she attacked for

12 its obsequiousness towards the erudite men who supported Hays. Wollstonecraft insisted that Hays ‘rest on [her]self.’ Hays, minimized the flattery towards her male mentors who, Wollstonecraft insisted, whatever their verbal flattery, ‘will still treat you like a woman – and many a man, for instance Dr. Johnson, Lord Littelton [sic], and even Dr, [sic] Priestley, have insensibly been led to utter warm elogiums in private that they would be sorry openly to avow without some cooling explanatory ifs’.27

In Letters and Essays, Hays elaborated on Catharine Macaulay’s feminist last work, Letters on Education (1790), a fantasy of female tuition. Letters and Essays included four letters to ‘Amasia’, a biblical name that suggested female erudition based on the sharing of knowledge between two women, with Hays as fledgling instructor. She declared that her understanding was acquired, not the product of that feminine intuition historically attributed to women in the absence of male powers of reason. Traditional restrictions on female education produced gendered differences in intellectual achievement, but not in human potential, or in women’s willingness to strive for knowledge. Hays’s attention to the absence of learned women in the historical record foreshadowed Female Biography.

Reactions to the book were ideological. Liberal journals praised Hays for her understanding of ‘Priestlian’ philosophy and theology. The conservative English Review conflated the unattractive author and her thinning hair with her nasty ideas. Identifying Hays as ‘the baldest disciple of Mrs. Wollstonecraft’, he denounced her book as ‘an abortion’, predicting that ‘Female philosophers, while pretending to superior powers carry with them … a mental imbecility which damns them to fame’.28

Despite the detractors, Hays initiated contact with William Godwin, the well-connected political philosopher and novelist, in October 1794, asking to borrow a copy of his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Hays parlayed Godwin’s willingness to lend her his volumes into an intense relationship, played out mainly in her correspondence, punctuated by frequent conversations together, that altered her ambitions. Most stimulating for Hays was Godwin’s commitment to ‘the collision of mind with mind’, intellectual interactions between

13 women and men in new, more relaxed modes of sociability.29 Godwin insisted on equality with Hays, as Robinson had, to dramatic effect. In autumn 1795 Hays moved out of her mother’s home to rooms of her own. In October she wrote a lengthy letter to Godwin describing the reason for this momentous step. ‘Shall I reply, a kind of, I know not what, satisfaction in the idea of being free’.30

For Hays, freedom meant minute recording of her experience as a highly conscious, unmarried woman in quest of enlightenment. With Godwin’s support, Hays represented their ‘collision of mind to mind’ in her first novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), experimenting with living documents—her own letters to and from Frend and Godwin -- to tell the story of unrequited passion and disappointment that the promise of Enlightenment freedom was still inaccessible to women.

The novel was published in November 1796, and enjoyed the success of scandal. Readers of every political and religious persuasion were titillated by the ‘fiction’ that was widely—and correctly—believed to be autobiographical. When the hero, modeled on Frend, refuses to return the heroine’s feelings, Emma tells him that her desire for him trumps every other consideration: propriety, reputation, money, and chastity. In the most notorious statement in the book, Emma mischievously blurts out Frend’s name as a homonym: ‘My friend’, she cries, ‘I would give myself to you – the gift is not worthless.’

Publication of Emma Courtney coincided with increasing threat of invasion by the French, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, oppression against religious and political subversives, and an increase in gender conservatism. In this climate, perception of Hays as Godwin’s puppet was confirmed in Elizabeth Hamilton’s savage satire, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). Hamilton represented Hays as the anti-heroine, Brigetina Botherim, a sex-starved, man-chasing, and reformist ideologue intent on overturning conventional gender expectations. Brigetina crystallized the British majority view that revolutionary principles threatened to corrupt even sexual proprieties. Hamilton’s novel was a success; Hamilton created the persona of Hays as transgressive woman and prating fool, mimicking ‘French principles’ without understanding

14 their dangerous consequences. The conflation of Hays/Emma Courtney/Brigetina shaped Hays’s reputation into the twenty-first century, and has damaged the critical reception of Female Biography.

For the next several years Hays participated in the philosophical and literary debates in the Monthly Magazine, reviewed new publications that Wollstonecraft assigned her, and was an intimate member of the circle around Wollstonecraft and Godwin. She, like Godwin, was devastated by Wollstonecraft’s sudden death of the aftereffects of childbirth in 1797. Hays was bitter at having been excluded from Wollstonecraft’s death bed. Godwin had turned her away from the sickroom, saying that his wife already had enough attendants. Hays and Godwin quarreled soon after; she demanded the return of her letters to Wollstonecraft, and Godwin refused to restore all of them. In her isolation, Hays began a risky friendship with unstable poet, Charles Lloyd, friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Manning, and Robert Southey. Lloyd gossiped that Hays would have given herself to him had he asked her, and then recanted. Nevertheless, Hays’s reputation for immoral behavior persisted. In 1799, Anglican minister Richard Polwhele proposed a new gender category of ‘Unsex’d Females’ for Hays, Wollstonecraft, and other subversive women.31

In 1798, Hays published anonymously An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. In her preface, she acknowledged that she had begun the book some years before, but suspended it because Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman superseded her own. Hays argues that insufficient education is the cause of women’s distress. Improvements in ‘female education’ would benefit men, as well as women. The liberal Analytical Review praised Hays’s polemical militancy, and her astute comment that the chastity men profess to value in womenis hypocritical because of their own licentious behavior. The conservative Critical Review expressed the majority opinion: the Appeal was irresponsible, ungrammatical, and illogical.

In the same year, William Godwin published Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works, including her letters to Gilbert Imlay. He also published A Memoir of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights

15 of Woman, in which he proposed his late wife as one of the ‘glorious dead’. The private revelations in both publications aroused public and private fury.

Hays published her second novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799), the title taken from Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise, a feminist variation on Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), that included a rape scene. The critic for the Anti-Jacobin Review linked the fiction’s failures to the author’s unwomanly perspective. ‘To your distaff, Mary, to your distaff!’ he thundered.

Hays joined publisher Richard Phillips’s stable of writers as he experimented with a variety of formats for the increasing public appetite for biographies. His short-lived Annual Necrology 1797-8 (1800) was published with Hays’s ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft.’ In her ‘Memoirs’, Hays articulated her feminist faith: ‘In the intellectual advancement of women, and their consequent privileges in society, is to be traced the progress of civilization, or knowledge gradually superseding the dominion of brute-force’32. ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’ complemented, critiqued, and corrected Godwin’s Memoirs. Following Godwin’s chronology, Hays told Wollstonecraft’s story as a female biography, different from the male vitas of Great Men that dominated life-writing. Hays drew from Wollstonecraft’s published and unpublished writings, including excerpts from her love letters to Imlay that Godwin had made public. There was no need to invent theories or excuses for the wrongs of women: the inequities in sexual relations were painfully exposed in the searing letters Wollstonecraft wrote as Imlay’s interest in her waned.

Hays drew attention to the feminist precursor to Rights of Woman in Catharine Macaulay’s Treatise on Education, intimating a genealogy of female thinkers. At her death, Wollstonecraft was composing her second novel, The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, which was published posthumously by Godwin. Hays read the unfinished fiction, like the incomplete life, as testimony to the extreme discrepancy between Wollstonecraft’s visionary ideas and the risks she took to be free of societal constraints. The conclusion to ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’ was an elegy and a prayer for enlightened feminism. ‘Her own sex have lost, in the premature fate of this extraordinary woman, an able champion’, Hays lamented. ‘Yet she has not laboured in vain: the

16 spirit of reform is silently pursuing its course. Who can mark its limits?’ Hays’s ‘Memoirs’ of Wollstonecraft are included in volume six of the CHLE, annotated by Dr. Fiore Sireci.

Wollstonecraft’s death, a nearly final rupture with Godwin, and the prolonged cold war in England against subversives left Hays isolated. At the nadir of her life, Hays recognized that writing ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’ had crystallized and strengthened her conviction that telling an exceptional woman’s life was the first step to constructing an alternative narrative of the past to conventional history. Hays conceived the idea of a collection of women’s lives, like the multi-volume Biographia Britannica, edited by Unitarian Andrew Kippis, which included few women. From 1798 to 1802, Hays researched women that formed their own class of ‘productive genius and talent’. The six volumes of Female Biography present the stories of 300- plus women, remembered and forgotten in the historical record, of interest to Hays because they attest to women’s energetic achievements in the face of men’s refusal to acknowledge their competence.

The omission of Wollstonecraft from Female Biography s continues to be misread by commentators. The memoir of Wollstonecraft formed the template for Hays’s collective biographies of other women, allowing her to link Wollstonecraft’s struggle to the universal condition of women’s lives. Female Biography expressed Hays’s views on reputation, manners, and attitudes as these were filtered through millennia of male intolerance toward women and women’s surrender of the power to control their own lives because they lacked the knowledge to resist. With the memoir of Wollstonecraft already published, Hays now selected women who embodied the values she and Wollstonecraft had defined together. Hays included two women Wollstonecraft had known, Manon Roland, Girondist martyr of the French Revolution, and Catharine Macaulay, pioneering historian of English liberties. Women’s self-writing was an integral element of Hays’s portraits, as well as the assessments, positive and negative, of their contemporaries. Hays quoted big swatches of text from the recent English translation of Roland’s posthumous Appeal to Impartial Posterity (1795). Hays did original research for the entry on Macaulay, tracking down her second husband’s sister for accurate information that refuted the disgrace of Macaulay’s marriage to a much younger man. Hays collected for the first time together productive women in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy like Hypatia and

‘Newtonian’ Laura Bassi; members of the ‘new genus’ of professional women writers; women who led armies, forged political alliances, initiated apostolic revivals, achieved fluency in eleven languages, painted, traveled, and the many queens who, Hays posited, were the sole class of females positioned to deploy real power.

Hays acknowledged that misogyny was so embedded in Western culture that even otherwise free-thinking Dissenters and political radicals could not discern that it presented another, pervasive obstacle to full humanity for both sexes. Her choice of Bayle’s Dictionary as a model for her compendium was at once obvious and subtle. Robert Robinson introduced Hays to Bayle’s work. Robinson’s role as cultural gadfly was akin to Bayle’s, and an integral element in Hays’s intellectual genealogy and authorial posture. She inherited Bayle along with the other mental ‘furniture’ Robinson bequeathed her. However, unlike Robinson, Bayle was an unrepentant misogynist, interested in the dynamics, but not the existential realities, of ‘the harsh law of honour, which exposes [women] to infamy when they succumb to the natural inclination.’33 He accepted that ‘the reason that women abstain incomparably more than men from the crime of incontinence stems from the fact that men have established the glory of women as consisting in chastity.’ To confirm this, he quoted Ovid: ‘Casta est quam nemo rogavit: A pure woman is one whom no one has asked for’, a charge Hays recognized was insinuated by her detractors. Yet Bayle elevated the 165 female figures he commented on to objects of historical inquiry. Hays recognized the opportunity to draw on Bayle’s scholarship, assess his female entries, and critique the skeptic himself.

Bayle was preoccupied with chastity, especially as it interfered with the life of the mind. He never married, devoting his life to his writings. Bayle chose for his Dictionary entries women that were erudite and elite, courtesans and queens, as well as learned women. He was suspicious of ‘enthusiasm’: in his discussion of prophetess Antoinette Bourignon, for example, CHLE scholar Mirjam de Baar points out ‘by adopting a rather mocking tone and focusing attention on inconsistencies in her pronouncements and on the discrepancy between her ideas and her actions’, Bayle denigrated Bourignon for her Quietist faith, and emphasized her ‘remarkable chastity’ and her ugliness.34 Hays rejected Bayle’s insistence that female chastity was the only criterion for women. She calibrated women’s obedience or resistance to religious and social

18 norms for sexual behavior as the touchstone to a woman’s reputation. Implicitly, Hays judged that while Bayle advocated religious toleration, he failed to connect universal toleration with the consequences of misogyny. Hays took a more generous view of the affairs, erotic and otherwise, of the women she represented. Intrigue, passion, and duplicity, were all part of distinguishing the individual, although she reprimanded the ‘licentiousness’ of Catherine II, among several others. .

Hays was the only radical British femme philosophe to connect toleration explicitly with gender: women, she explained, were the targets of the same intolerance as men, and of men’s intolerance, as well. She adapted Robinson’s historiography in Female Biography to construct an imagined continuum of women who encountered, but resisted, censorship and persecution because of religious and political persuasions.35 Hays shared with Robinson and Bayle, special veneration for Marguerite of Navarre as a humanist hero, whom she praised for the ‘exercise of her own judgment on subjects held important and sacred…despite…the censures she incurred, and the dangers which threatened her.’36

Hays wrote her lives in as much detail as she could find. There is no card for Hays at the British Library, as there is for Catharine Macaulay; it is unlikely that Hays made use of their resources. We can only speculate about how Hays retrieved the information she needed for her ‘female biographies.’ Her surviving correspondence sheds some light: she took advantage of the generosity of erudite Unitarians she knew: the William Tookes, father and son, both lawyers and scholars; John Aikin, brother of Anna Barbauld and one of the current editors of the Biographia Britannica; Mrs. Barbauld; Reverend Rochemont Barbauld37; Robert Southey; and possibly William Enfield, Dr. George Gregory, and others. The well-endowed private libraries and the learned give-and-take with their owners, provided, as at New College, freedom for Hays to follow her curiosity as she researched, and to learn as she wrote.

Like many of her contemporaries, Hays appropriated others’ texts, sometimes verbatim, or with her minute or major changes, with attribution as learned men did, and without. This has proved to be one of the contentious elements in preparing the edition: Internet searches often led us to the original source of Hays’s borrowing, and we asked CHLE scholars to keep track of Hays’s use of others’ words.

Scholars debate the historical moment when ‘plagiarism’ became a crime, usually locating this in the disputes of the 18th century. By the early 19th century the demand for ‘originality’ emerged as an important innovation of Romanticism. In her ‘Preface’, Hays describes herself as a ‘compiler’, like Bayle and the Encyclopedists who, as a matter of course, lifted copy from others’ publications. Texts were not sacrosanct entities to her: she paraphrases, embroiders, mixes quotations, and in these not insignificant alterations, makes intriguing choices about gender, sexuality, culpability, ambition, and consequences.

Interspersed among the well known names Hays includes are numerous ‘learned ladies’ of whom Hays could find little beyond the name and assertion that the woman knew Greek, Latin, and possibly Hebrew. Ian Plant, Greek Editor for CHLE, notes that in the entry for Charixena, Hays describes her as a ‘learned Greek lady.’: Hays uses the term ‘lady’ to describe Charixena twice, the second time being one of the few variations in wording from Charixena’s entry in Biographium faemineum. This alteration gives Charixena a status and respect she was not accorded in antiquity.38 We can conjecture that Hays uses ‘lady’ as an honorific, not related to social or economic class. She demonstrates an authorial soft spot for obscure erudite women like Cecilia Heron and Lady Grace Gethin whose writings were found and published after their death. Susanna Åkerman advises, ‘A woman who knows Latin, Geek and some Hebrew is worth mentioning, because knowledge of these languages defines a "humanist" (males also), able to participate in the learned tradition of the West.’39

Women who pursue the life of the mind are among the questions to be answered in Female Biography. Rather than referring to a single female, the entry for ‘Anonymous’ includes five learned women, distinguished Newtonian physicist Laura Bassi, among them, and CHLE scholar Marta Cavazzi has recently postulated a sixth. CHLE scholars María Jesús Lorenzo Modia and Elgin Eckert tracked down Isabella of Cordova, also known as Isabella Losa of Cordova, with the help of CHLE scholar Georgianna Ziegler, Louis B. Thalheimer Head of Reference, Folger Shakespeare Library, who traces Cordaud to Lempriere’s Universal Biography (London, 1808). That would have been too late for Hays’s use in Female Biography.. Lempriere’s entry reads, she

‘was so illustrious for her knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, that she was honored with the degree of D.D. When she became a widow she took the habit of Sr. Clair, and founded in Italy the hospital of Loretto, where she ended her days in the bosom of devotion, 1546, aged 73.’40 The research on Isabella Losa continues. Hays also signals her interest in martyrs, women who struggle whether they are Catholics or Conversos; and warriors, from the Classical Egee, Queen of the Amazons, to the obscure Maria d’Estrada, wife of a Spanish soldier in Cortez’s army who fought alongside her husband in Mexico.

We approached Female Biography as a laboratory for historical women. This led to questions. How did a self-taught woman produce a substantial late Enlightenment encyclopedia of women? How did she access the sources she includes, and those, more problematical, that she used and did not document? How did she come by her many complex judgments of women far removed from her in time, place, religious persuasion, temperament, ambition, and experience? These are some of the many questions we are left with about Hays and her Female Biography.

The many uncertainties had strong bearing on the editorial practices of the CHLE. Like many authors/intellectuals of her time, Hays is uneven in the length of her entries,unreliable in her citations, and unpredictable in her information Hays confuses historical figures . Her biography of ‘Henrietta of Bourbon’ is actually Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier; the entry for Isabella de Gonzaga is actually Elisabetta Gonzaga. Similarly, she combines multiple women into one biography, adding sisters or nieces to the story. Perhaps because of a printer’s error, Hays includes Madame Seturman and Anna Maria von Schurman as two separate entries, although they are the same person. Some of the disorder of Hays’s work may be traced to Richard Phillips’s sloppy business practices which made even his authors suspicious of him. His skinflint approach shows in Female Biography: carelessness, haste, and exhaustion can be felt in the pages, beginning with the Table of Contents in which entries are alphabetized by last name, except when, as in the case of, for example, ‘Agnes Sorrel’ they are ordered by first name – and the correct spelling is ‘Agnès Sorel.’

Hays’s inventiveness as a female autodidact created problems in composing the entries for Female Biography, and difficulties for the editor and editorial team, scholars, and researchers in retracing Hays’s steps for the general reader of CHLE. In the truest sense, Hays’s ‘female biographies’ are palimpsests, texts inscribed, like animal prints in a fossil bed, with centuries of different, and differing, markings. Mary Spongberg provides a special appendix to volume six on Hays’s sources.

The major editorial decisions involved organizing and annotating the 300 entries. The obvious strategy was to invite a specialist scholar to pair with each of Hays’s subjects, and provide student research assistance, at the scholar’s request. As the pairing of ‘female biography’ and specialist began, the variety of languages, academic disciplines, historical periods, cultural idiosyncrasies, and sources required differing kinds of review. We established a series of section editorships: Greek, Latin, English, French and Spanish, Italian, Miscellaneous, a general History editor, and a network of internal editors to vet the submissions and prepare them for publication, according to the Pickering & Chatto Editorial Guidelines. These include Editorial Editor, Submissions Editor, and Editorial Liaison, supported by Editorial Assistants. CHLE is a collaborative feminist production that would probably astonish Hays.

Reading the volumes of Female Biography constitutes an education in itself, as Hays intended for her readers. The parade of the past, and the female narrator’s voice, like Ariadne, lead the reader through the maze of personalities, events, and dynastic politics. Female Biography is informed by the central motive of Hays’s own life, ‘an inexpressible passion for the acquisition of knowledge, an ardor approaching the limits of pain.’41 The wonder is that Hays accomplished what she set out to do in Female Biography at all, without willing scholars, editors and assistants, and without the ease of a multitude of virtual primary sources at her fingertips.

In Female Biography Hays composed a ‘city of ladies’ – although Christine de Pizan is not to be found - displaying an imaginary lineage of women she brought together for the first time from the historical record in which they had languished, mostly marginal, hidden or ignored. Hays envisioned an imagined community in which women of many historical eras, nationalities, political and theological persuasions, morals and classes, invite the reader into their gendered realm. Now CHLE revitalizes each ‘female biography’, making new space for authors, subjects, scholars, researchers, editors, and, most importantly readers, to gather, giving further life to Hays’s groundbreaking encyclopedia, and to ‘female biography’ as a category for future investigation.

1 Unless otherwise indicated, all biographical information about Hays is taken from G. L. Walker, Mary Hays (1759–1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind (Surrey: Ashgate, 2005); G. L. Walker, The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005); G. L. Walker and G. W. Ditchfield (eds.), ‘Energetic Sympathies of Truth and Feeling: Mary Hays and Rational Dissent’, Special issue of Enlightenment and Dissent, Intellectual Exchanges: Women and Rational Dissent 26 (2010), pp. 259-285; G .L. Walker, ‘Women’s Voices’, in Pamela Clemit (ed.). Cambridge Companion to British Writing of the French Revolution, 1789-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 265-294; G. L. Walker ‘The Two Marys: Hays Writes Wollstonecraft’, in Enit K. Steiner (ed.), The Rights of Woman (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2013). 2 Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin, ed. P. H. Le Breton (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), p. 126. 3 Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin, p. 124. I appreciate Felicia Gordon’s retrieval and transcription of these excerpts. 4 Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld, Including Letters and Notices of Her Family and Friends, ed. A. L. Le Breton (London: George Bell and Sons, 1874), p. 86-7. 5 W. McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 648, n. 54. 6 The Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature; Extended and Improved 2nd Series, Vol. 37 (London: S. Hamilton, 1803), pp. 415.-24. 7 M. Hays, ‘Elizabeth Bury’, Female Biography, 1st edn, 6 vols (London: R. Phillips, 1803), vol. 2, p. 69. 8 Bookseller’s Notice, John Hart, Binham, Norfolk, UK, 2005. 9 Susanna Åkerman to Gina Luria Walker, 28 August 2012, personal communication (email). 10 M. Spongberg, ‘Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft and the evolution of Dissenting Feminism’, Enlightenment and Dissent, [Special Issue Intellectual Exchanges, Women and Rational Dissent] 26 (2010), pp. 230–58, p. 254. 11 B. A. Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 12 M. Waters, 'The first of a new genus - ': Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and The Analytical Review', British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 86-120. 13. T. Lindsey, A Sermon Preached at the Opening of the Chapel in Essex House, Essex-Street...April 17, 1774, 3rd edn (London: J. Johnson, 1792), p 9. 14 J. Priestley, Reflections on death. A Sermon, on occasion of the death of the Rev. Robert Robinson, of Cambridge, delivered at the New Meeting in Birmingham, 13 June 1790, and published at the request of those who heard it, and of Mr. Robinson’s family (Birmingham: J. Belcher, 1790), 419.

15 E. Kell, ‘Memoir of Mary Hays: With some unpublished letters addressed to her by Robert Robinson, of Cambridge, and others’, The Christian Reformer, XI/CXXIX (1844), 814. 16 Gilbert Wakefield, An enquiry into the expediency and propriety of public or social worship (London: J. Deighton, 1791). 17 M. Hays, Cursory remarks on An Enquiry into the expediency and propriety of public or social worship: Inscribed toGilbert Wakefield, B.A., late fellow of Jesus-College, Cambridge. By EUSEBIA 2nd edn (London, 1792), p. 1. The pamphlet in DWL in London bears Theophilus Lindsey’s signature, and is the copy Hays sent him as a gift. 18 A. Barbauld, ‘Remarks on Mr. Wakefield’s Enquiry….’ (London: J. Johnson, 1792). 19 A second edition, subtitled ‘A New Edition’, was published after 29 Feb. 1792, by Deighton. Wakefield’s response to ‘Eusebia’ is from the ‘Appendix’, 59. Gilbert Wakefield responded again in ‘A general reply to the arguments against the enquiry into public worship’, published after 19 June 1792. In this work, Wakefield replied to his critics, including Dr. Disney, Mr. Wilson, Anna Barbauld, Dr. Priestley, Mr. Simpson, Mr. Bruckner, Mr. Pope, as well as ‘Eusebia.’ 20 ‘Cursory Remarks on An Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship: Inscribed to Gilbert Wakefield, B.A., Late Fellow of Jesus-College, Cambridge. By EUSEBIA’ 2nd edn (London: T. Knott, 1792), p. 1. 21 William Frend to ‘Eusebia’, 16 April 1792, Doctor Williams’s Library (hearafter DWL), London, HCR 24/93, ff 2. 22 George Dyer to Mary Hays, 28 February 1794, Pforzheimer Collection, NYPL, (hearafter PC), 2107. 23 John Disney to Mary Hays, 7 February 1793, DWL, 24/93, ff. 4. 24 Hugh Worthington to Mary Hays, 16 June 1791, DWL, 24/93, ff. 9. 25 Hugh Worthington to Mary Hays, 17 January 1794, DWL, 24/93, ff. 18. 26 Hays to Hugh Worthington, 3 July 1792, in private hands. 27 Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Hays, November 25 [17]92, The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 210. 28 [John] Evans to Mary Hays, [c. 1793], PC, 2202. 29 P. Clemit, ‘Godwin, Women, and “The Collision of Mind with Mind’, The Wordsworth Circle, 35:2 (Spring, 2004), pp. 72-6. 30 Mary Hays to William Godwin, 13 October 1795, PC, MH, ff. 8. 31 Richard Polwhele (1760-1838) was an Anglican minister, poet, topographer of Cornwall and Devon, acquaintance of Catharine Macaulay, Anna Sewell, and Hannah More, and a contributor to the Anti-Jacobin Review. His mock epic, The UnSex’d Females (1798), contrasted More and Wollstonecraft as ‘in all points diametrically opposed’. Among the perverted ‘Wollstonecraftians’, Polwhele identified Hays, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Ann Yearsley, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld.

32 Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’ Annual Necrology, 1797-8 (London: 1800), pp. 411-60, on pp. 422-23. 33 P. Bayle, ‘Ninth Letter (August 2, 1681)’, in R. C. Bartlett (ed.), Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet (Albany : State University of New York Press 2000), pp. 200-2. 34 M. de Baar, ‘Conflicting Discourses on Female Dissent in the Early Modern Period: The Case of Antoinette Bourignon (1616-1680)’, L’Atilier du Centre de recherches historiques 4 (2009), at http://acrh.revues.org/1399 ; DOI : 10.4000/acrh.1399. 35 For a discussion of Robinson’s influence on Hays, see G. L. Walker, “’Sewing in the Next World’: Mary Hays as Dissenting Autodidact in the 1780s,” Romanticism On the Net 25 (February 2002),at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/25walker.html. 36 M. Hays, ‘Margaret de Valois’, Female Biography, 1st edn, 6 vols (London: R. Phillips, 1803), vol. 5, pp., 472-3. 37 Lucy Aikin to Mary Hays, 14 January 1805, PC, misc. ms: 2149; William McCarthy to Gina Luria Walker, 26 August 2012, personal communication (email). 38 I. Plant, ‘Charixena’, CHLE, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), vol. 3 pp. 286. 39 Susanna Åkerman to Gina Luria Walker, 28 August 2012, personal communication (email). 40 Georgianna Ziegler to Koren Whipp, personal correspondence (email); Elgin K. Eckert to Gina Luria Walker and Koren Whipp, 14 August 2012, personal correspondence (email); María Jesús Lorenzo Modia to Gina Luria Walker and Koren Whipp, 15 August 2012, personal correspondence; 41 Mary Hays to William Godwin, 6 May 1795, PC, MH 4, Brooks, 118, p. 391.