Female Biography in two cloth slipcases.
Hays, Mary. Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all ages and Countries. Alphabetically arranged. In six volumes. London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 71, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, by Thomas Davison, White-Friars, 1803.
6 vols., 8vos.; bookplate on front pastedowns; occasional foxing, especially to preliminaries; uniformly bound in contemporary marbled boards; morocco spines, stamped in gilt; hinges tender and occasionally split; spines rubbed; all-in-all, a handsome set. In two specially made cloth slipcases.
First edition of Hays’s exceedingly scarce compilation of nearly three hundred biographies of women “illustrious or distinguished” of the past, with “but few” of those “who have come nearer to our own times” (preface); modeled, it would seem, on Samuel Johnson’s vastly popular Lives of the Poets. The most notable omission among her peers is Mary Wollstonecraft, who had been an important influence. The biographies range from less than a single page to an extraordinary 428 pages (devoted to Catherine II, an explanation for which is offered in the preface), each attempted in a style that would engage her target audience: “women, unsophisticated by the pedantry of the schools, [who] read not for dry information, to load their memories with uninteresting facts, or to make a display of a vain erudition,” who “require pleasure to be mingled with instruction, lively images, the graces of sentiment, and the polish of language,” and whose “understandings are principally accessible through their affections.”
Suffice it to observe, that my book is intended for women, and not for scholars; that my
design was, not to surprise by fiction, or to astonish by profound research, but to collect
and concentrate, in one interesting point of view, those engaging pictures, instructive
narrations, and striking circumstances, that may answer a better purpose than the
gratification of a vain curiosity…. I have at heart the happiness of my sex, and their
advancement in the grand scale of rational and social existence….
Born into a dissenting family in Southwark, Mary Hays (1760-1843) had her quiet, lower-middleclass existence brutally disturbed by the death of her fiancé in 1780. Devastated, she threw herself into literary work and corresponded with dissenting clerics like Robert Robinson (1735-1790), who provided both emotional consolation and intellectual stimulation. Robinson encouraged her, publishing her first essay, “The Hermit, an Oriental Tale,” in the Universal Magazine in 1786. Through Robinson, Hays entered the world of 1790s London radicalism—meeting and corresponding with figures like Paine, Godwin, Priestley, and, most importantly, Mary Wollstonecraft.
After reading Vindication of the Rights of Women Hays found herself transformed. Wollstonecraft’s influence is evident in Hays’s preface to Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793), in which she lauds the author of Vindication as someone who “endeavoured to rescue the female mind from those prejudices by which it has been systematically weakened.” Hays notes in her preface to Female Biography that one of her own goals is to “excite a worthier emulation” of women “whose endowments, or whose conduct, have reflected lustre upon the sex,” by women of “the rising generation, who have not grown old in folly, whose hearts have not been seared by fashion, and whose minds prejudice has not yet warped.”
Hays relentlessly attacks the “Authority” that “bolts and bars” the “female body, but can never enchain the noble, the free-born mind.” Her books The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and Victim of Prejudice (1799) echoed the themes of Wollstonecraft’s Maria and attacked the way in which women’s sexual desires were circumscribed and punished by a frightened and hostile patriarchy. Indeed, Emma Courtney became something of a succès de scandale owing to Hays’s use of her own frank—if unrequited—love letters to William Frend
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