A Selected Bibliography of 

Mary Hays 

Adams, M. Ray. “Mary Hays, Disciple of William Godwin.” In Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism. Lancaster, PA: Franklin and Marshall College Studies, no. 5, 1947. 83-103. 

Adams, M. Ray. “Mary Hays, Disciple of William Godwin.” PLMA 55 (1940), 472-83.

Beloe, William. The Sexagenarian; Or, the Recollections of a Literary Life. 2 vols. 2nd ed. London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1818. 359-61.

Bergmann, Helena. A Revised Reading of Mary Hays’ Philosophical Novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney: Enlarging the Canon of the Mary Wollstonecraft Literary-Philosophical Circle. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.

Binhammer, Catherine. “The Persistence of Reading: Governing Female Novel-Reading in Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers." Eighteenth-Century Life 27.2 (2003), 1-22.

Brooks, Marilyn. The Correspondence (1779-1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist. Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. 

Brooks, Marilyn. “A Critical Study of the Writings of Mary Hays, with an Edition of her Unpublished Letters to William Godwin.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of London, 1995.

Brooks, Marilyn. “Mary Hays: Finding a Voice in Dissent.” Enlightenment and Dissent 14 (1995), 3-24.

Brooks, Marilyn. “Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice: Chastity Renegotiated.” Women’s Writing 15.1 (2008), 13-31.

Brooks, Marilyn, ed. Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000. 

Capern, Amanda L. “Mary Hays and the Imagined Female Communities of Early Modern Europe.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 174-98.

Chen, Li-ching. “‘This Eccentric Step’: Mary Hays's Resolution and Independence.” NTU Studies in Language and Literature 38 (2017), 27-54.

Chen, Li-ching. “‘A Knowledge of the Useful: Economy in Mary Hays's Family Annals, or the Sisters." Ex-position 44 (2020), 127-54.

Chen, Li-ching. “‘Like the Lion in his Den’: Mary Hays, Solitude and Women’s Enfranchisement.” European Romantic Review 32.3 (2021): 335-54.

Chatterjee, Ranita. “Sapphic Subjectivity and Gothic Desires in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy (1795).” Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004), 45-56.

Faulkner, Sarah. “Artifact or Artifice? The Epistolary Image of Mary Hays (1759-1843).” In Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Brenda Ayres. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 57-73.

Findley, Sandra. “Feminist Politics and the Fiction of Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Essex, 1982.

Fisk, Nicole Plyler. “‘A wild, wick slip she was’: The Passionate Female in Wuthering Heights and The Memoirs of Emma Courtney.” Bronte Studies 31.2 (2006), 133-43.

Fletcher, Loraine. “Four Jacobin Women Novelists.” Writing and Radicalism, ed. John Lucas (London: Longman, 1996). 

Green, Georgina. “Fiction and Autobiography in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796).” Literature Compass 4.3 (2007), 709-20. 

Grundy, Isobel. “Introduction.” Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock. Ed. Isobel Grundy. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998.

Guest, Harriet. “Modern Love: Feminism and Sensibility in 1796.” Conservative Modernity: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics  28 (1996).   

Hernandez, Jill Graper. “Atrocious Evil, Divinely Perfected: An Early Modern Feminist’s Contribution to Theodicy.” Journal of Religion 94.1 (2014), 26-48.

Hoagwood, Terence Allan, ed. The Victim of Prejudice. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1990. 3-12.

Hodson, Jane. “Women Write the Rights of Woman: Sexual Politics of the Personal Pronoun in the 1790s.” Language and Literature 16.3 (2007), 281-303.

Hutton, Sarah. “The Persona of the Woman Philosopher in Eighteenth-Century England: Catherine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton.” Intellectual History Review 18.3 (2008), 403-12.

Jacobus, Mary. “Traces of an Accusing Spirit: Mary Hays and the Vehicular State.” Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading. Oxford: OUP, 1999). 

James, Felicity. “Writing Female Biography: Mary Hays and the Life-Writing of Religious Dissent.” Women’s Life Writing, 1700-1850, ed. Daniel Cook and Amy Culley. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 117-32.

Johnson, Claudia. Equivocal Beings.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.  

Jones, Chris. Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s. London: Routledge, 1993. 

Joy, Louise. “Novel Feelings: Emma Courtney’s Point of View.” European Romantic Review 21.2 (2010), 221-34. 

Keegan, Peter. “Agrippina to Veturia: Ancient and Modern Companions to Female Biography.”  Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 145-73.

Kell, E. “Memoir of Mary Hays: With Some Unpublished Letters addressed to her by Robert Robinson, of Cambridge, and Others.”  Christian Reformer 11 (September 1844), 813-20. 

Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing and Revolution 1790-1827. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993.

Kucich, Greg. “Women’s Historiography and the (dis)Embodiment of Law: Ann Yearsley, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Benger.” The Wordsworth Circle  33.1 (2002), 3-7. 

Ledoux, Ellen Malenas. “Defiant Damsels: Gothic Space and Female Agency in Emmeline, The Mysteries of Udolpho and Secresy.” Women’s Writing 18.3 (2011), 331-47.

Livingston, Sally A. “Lost in Translation: Mary Hays reads Heloise.” Women’s Writing 25.2 (2018), 186-199.

Lorenzo-Modia, Maria Jesus. “Mary Hays and Learned Women in the Renaissance: The Cases of Isabella de Rosares and Isabella de Josa.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 37-54. 

McInnes, Andrew. “Feminism in the Footnotes: Wollstonecraft’s Ghost in Mary Hays’ Female Biography.” Life Writing 8.3 (2011), 273-85.

Mandell, Laura. “Producing Hate in ‘Private’ Letters: Horace Walpole, Mary Hays.” European Romantic Review 17.2 (2006), 169-77.

Mandell, Laura. “The First Women (Psycho)analysts: or, The Friends of Feminist History.” Modern Language Quarterly 65.1 (2004), 69-92.

Mannies, Whitney. “Towards a Radical Feminist Historiography.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 243-58.

Marshall, Alan. “Elizabeth Cromwell and Mary Hays.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 218-40.

Moran, Mary Jeanette. Review of Walker’s Mary Hays. Journal of British Studies 47.1 (2008), 197-98. 

Murray, Julie. “Mary Hays and the Forms of Life.” Studies in Romanticism 52 (2013), 61-84.

Norton, Brian Michael. “Emma Courtney, Feminist Ethics, and the Problem of Autonomy.” Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation 54.3 (2013), 297-315.

Nowka, Scott. “Materialism and Feminism in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney.” European Romantic Review 12.1 (2001), 1-42. 

Pallitto, Elizabeth. “A Mirrored Hall of Fame: Reading Mary Hays reading Tullia D’Aragona.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 199-217.

Paz, Carem Font. “Mary Hays’s Invisible Women: Manuscript Poetry and the Practice of Life-Writing in Ann Yerbury (1720-1754).” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 105-23.

Pedersen, Joyce Senders. “Friendship in the Life and Work of Mary Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Liberal Feminist Tradition.” Literature and History 17.1 (2008), 19-35.

Plant, Ian. “Mary Hays’s Classical Women and the Promotion of Female Agency.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 83-104. 

Pollin, Burton R. “Mary Hays on Women’s Rights in the Monthly Magazine.” Etudes Anglaises 24.3 (1971), 271-82.

Polyak, Dee. “‘I wish that I could have known before’: Female Biography and Feminist Epistemologies.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 259-72.

Purdie, Susan, and Sarah Oliver. “William Frend and Mary Hays: Victims of Prejudice.” Women’s Writing 17.1 (2010), 93-110.

Rajan, Tilottama. “Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney.Romanticism 32.2 (1993), 149-76.

Rajan, Tilottama. Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2010. 

Rogers, Katherine, “The Contribution of Mary Hays.” Prose Studies 10.2 (1987), 131-42.

Sharma, Anjana. “A Different Voice: Mary Hays’s The Memoirs of Emma Courtney.” Women’s Writing 8.1 (2001), 139-68.

Spongberg, Mary. “The ‘Abelard Complex’: William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Gender of Romantic Biography.” Angelika 13.2 (2008), 17-31.

Spongberg, Mary. “The Gender of Censorship: John Wilson Croker, Mary Hays and the Aftermath of the Queen Caroline Affair.”  Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View. Ed. Nicole Moore. New York, NY; Bloomsbury, 2015. 49-63.

Spongberg, Mary. “Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft and the Evolution of Dissenting Feminism.” Enlightenment and Dissent 26 (2010), 230-58.

Spongberg, Mary. “Memoirs of Queens and the ‘invention' of Collective Royal Biography.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 124-42.

Spongberg, Mary. “Remembering Wollstonecraft: Feminine Friendship, Female Subjectivity and the ‘Invention’ of the Feminist Heroine.” Women’s Life Writing, 1700-1850. Ed. Daniel Cook and Amy Culley. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK, 2012. 165-80.

Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800. London: Virago, 1980. 

Tompkins, J. M. S. “Mary Hays, Philosophess.” The Polite Marriage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1938. 150-87.

Turner, Cheryl. Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1992.

Ty, Eleanor. Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. 

Ty, Eleanor. “Introduction.” The Victim of Prejudice. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1995.

Walker, Gina Luria. “Energetic Sympathies of Truth and Feeling: Mary Hays and Rational Dissent.” Enlightenment and Dissent 26 (2010), 259-85.

Walker, Gina Luria, ed. Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women. 6 vols. Chawton House Library Edition. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013-14.

Walker, Gina Luria, ed. The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006.

Walker, Gina Luria. “Introduction.” Walker, The Invention of Female Biography. 3-18.

Walker, Gina Luria, ed. The Invention of Female Biography. Chawton Studies in Scholarly Editing. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018. 

Walker, Gina Luria. “I sought and made myself an extraordinary destiny.” Women's Writing 25.2 (2018): 124-149.

Walker, Gina Luria. “Mary Hays: A Critical Biography.” Doctoral Dissertation, New York University, 1972.

Walker, Gina Luria. “Mary Hays (1759-1843): An Enlightened Quest.” Women, Gender, and Enlightenment: A Comparative History, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor. Houndsmill, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 

Walker, Gina Luria. “Mary Hays’s Letters & Manuscripts.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3.2 (1977), 524-30.

Walker, Gina Luria. “Mary Hays’s ‘Love Letters.’” Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002): 94-115.

Walker, Gina Luria. Mary Hays (1759-1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006.

Walker, Gina Luria. “‘Sewing in the Next World’: Mary Hays as Dissenting Autodidact in the 1780s.” Romanticism on the Net (February 2002). 

Walker, Gina Luria. “The Two Marys: Hays Writes Wollstonecraft.” In Called to Civil Existence: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Enit Karafili Steiner. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2014, 49-70.

Wallace, Miriam L. Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel, 1790-1805. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2009.  

Wallace, Miriam L. “Writing Lives and Gendering History in Mary Hays's Female Biography (1803).” Romantic Autobiography in England, ed. Eugene Stelzig. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 63-78.

Ward, Ian. “The Prejudices of Mary Hays.” International Journal of Law in Context 5.2 (2009), 131-46. 

Waters, Mary. Review of Walker’s Mary Hays, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42.1 (2008), 177-79.

Waters, Mary. “‘The first of a new genus’: Mary Wollstonecraft as a Literary Critic and Mentor to Mary Hays.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.3 (2004), 415-43.

Wedd, Anne F., ed. The Fate of the Fenwicks. London: Methuen, 1927.

Wedd, Anne F., ed. Love-Letters of Mary Hays (1779-1780).London Methuen, 1925.

Whelan, Timothy. “Elizabeth Hays and the 1790s Feminist Novel.” The Wordsworth Circle 48.3 (2017), 137-51.

Whelan, Timothy. “Mary Hays and Henry Crabb Robinson.” The Wordsworth Circle 46.3 (2015), 176-90.

Whelan, Timothy. “Mary Steele, Mary Hays and the Convergence of Women’s Literary Circles in the 1790s.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.4 (2015), 511-24.

Whelan, Timothy, gen. ed. Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840. 8 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. 

Whelan, Timothy. Other British Voices: Women, Poetry, and Religion, 1766-1840. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 

Whipp, Koren. “Finding Anonymous: Further Discoveries in Mary Hays’s Female Biography.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 55-70.

Woodacre, Elena. “Well Represented or Missing in Action? Queens, Queenship and Mary Hays.” Walker, Invention of Female Biography. 21-36. 

Wordsworth, Jonathan, ed. Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Spelsbury, Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1995. n.p.

Zunac, Mark J. “‘The Dear-Bought Lessons of Experience’: Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice and the Empiricist Revision of Burke's Reflections.” Papers on Language and Literature 48.1 (2012), 70-100.