Mary Hays

Mary Hays
Born	13 October 1759 London
Died	1843 London
Nationality	English
Occupation	writer, feminist
Known for	compiling and editing Female Biography

Mary Hays (1759–1843) was an autodidact intellectual who published essays, poetry, novels, and several works on famous (and infamous) women. She is remembered for her early feminism, and her close relations to dissenting and radical thinkers of her time including Robert Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and William Frend. She was born in 1759, into a family of Protestant dissenters who rejected the practices of the Church of England (the established church). Hays was described by those who disliked her as 'the baldest disciple of [Mary] Wollstonecraft' by The Anti Jacobin Magazine, attacked as an 'unsex'd female' by clergyman Robert Polwhele, and provoked controversy through her long life with her rebellious writings. When Hays's fiancé John Eccles died on the eve of their marriage, Hays expected to die of grief herself. But this apparent tragedy meant that she escaped an ordinary future as wife and mother, remaining unmarried. She seized the chance to make a career for herself in the larger world as a writer.

Hays was influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and after writing admiringly to her, the two women became friends. The backlash following Wollstonecraft's death and posthumous publication of her Memoirs impacted Hays' later work, which some scholars have called more conservative. Among these later productions is the six-volume compendium Female Biography: or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries, in which Wollstonecraft is not mentioned, although Hays had written an extensive obituary for The Annual Necrology shortly after Godwin's controversial Memoirs. If Wollstonecraft was neglected through the nineteenth century, Hays and her writing received even less critical evaluation or academic attention until the twentieth-century's emerging feminist movement.

Mary Hays was born in London 13 October 1759, the daughter of Rational Dissenters John and Elizabeth Hays.

In 1777 she met and fell in love with John Eccles. Their parents initially opposed the match but they met secretly and exchanged over 100 letters. The two were eventually engaged, but in August 1780, Eccles died of a fever. Hays wrote: "All my pleasures – and every opening prospect are buried with him". This spurred her to take up writing. For the next ten years she wrote essays and poems. A short story, "Hermit: an Oriental Tale," was published in 1786 in Universal Magazine. It was a picturesque tale that warned against feeling too much passion. She exchanged letters with Robert Robinson, a minister who campaigned against the slave trade. She attended the dissenting academy in Hackney in the late 1780s.

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