Though Wedd was a pioneer in presenting a collection of manuscript material on a woman writer, her editorial practices did little to enhance the literary career of Mary Hays as well as her friendship with Eliza Fenwick and never-ending domestic duties to her immediate and extended family. In fact, Wedd essentially erased, or we might say, "whited out," a significant body of information on Hays's life and family. As a result, Wedd's omissions, alterations, and inaccuracies helped create a skewed historical, biographical, and textual record on Hays that only until recently has finally been brought to closer scrutiny in Marilyn Brooks' Correspondence of Mary Hays (2004), Gina Luria Walker's selection of letters in The Idea of Being Free (2006) (36-86), as well as Walker's biography of Hays, Mary Hays (1759-1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind (2006). Wedd's deletions, though damaging to Hays, nevertheless provide a fascinating glimpse into how gender, whether on the part of the writer (Hays the 1790s Dissenter turned radical Jacobin writer) or the editor (Wedd, Hays's great-great niece raised as a proper child of Victorian British culture), determined what aspect of women's history was worth keeping and what was not. 

The Hays-Eccles letters are highly sentimental, which we would expect from two young lovers (Hays was born in 1759, Eccles in 1755) who were steeped in the sentimental literature of late eighteenth-century England (as their letters reveal). They were also devoted followers of the Dissenting culture into which they were raised as was evident in their participation each week at the Baptist "meetinghouse" at the end of Gainsford Street (also called Blackfields). The letters provide important details about Hays's circle of Dissenting friends, her family members, and the nature of her reading and ideas about education, religion, courtship and marriage, all foundational motifs and concerns that would mark her public career as a writer from the mid-1790s to the early 1820s.