Rationality, Sensibility, and Female Independence in Mary Hays's "Memoirs of Emma Courtney" and "The Victim of Prejudice"

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the figure of Mary Hays to demonstrate and to trace the impact of her novels on the British literary canon. Far from being a dead end or a failed deviation in the history of the development of British literature, the influence of Mary Hays’s legacy is not merely felt in the works of her immediate successors, on the contrary her theories on sexuality and femininity constitute a form of early feminism whose revolutionary appeal should be relevant even to modern day feminism. To achieve this aim, this dissertation is split in three chapters. Firstly, it traces the growth of Mary Hays’s mind as an unconventional female intellectual and thinker, providing a summary of her life experiences to identify the influences which played a major role in shaping her thought and her authorial style. The second part provides a close reading of her fist novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), to determine its major themes. This analysis highlights how Mary Hays exploits the form of the novel to further push and develop her progressive social agenda, delineated in her non-fictional treatises. Lastly, the focus shifts on Hays’s second novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799). By comparing her two novels and their main characters, this chapter demonstrates how her ideology evolved in the second half of the decade of the 1790s.