[In the following essay, Pollin examines Hays's contributions to the late eighteenth-century reform movement in the form of letters and essays she produced for the Monthly Magazine.]

While sifting the earliest issues of the Monthly Magazine for references to William Godwin, I was struck by the frequent mention of his name in the letters to the editor, from February 1796 through September 1797, chiefly on the subject of women's rights and education¹. The series included several signed “M. H.” and terminated with one signed by Godwin's friend, Mary Hays. Two of the very few studies of this ardent and curious suffragette, I discovered, mentioned her contributing to a “controversy on Helvétius” under these initials, but failed to examine or even identify the printed articles². They obviously relied for their information upon Southey's statement in a letter to Joseph Cottle, of March 13, 1797, soon after he met Mary Hays. Southey says, “She writes in the ‘Monthly Magazine’ under the signature of M. H., and sometimes writes nonsense there about Helvetius.” He adds that she is “an agreeable woman, and a Godwinite,” the author of “an uncommon book,” which has been “much praised and much abused.”³ Southey, who continued his friendship with Mary Hays for the rest of her long life (1760-1843), never felt inclined to revise that generally favorable opinion.

Mary Hays had enlisted herself among the liberal intellectuals of London and vehemently espoused the cause of women's rights in 1792 when Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published. Since her life has been at least sketchily treated by A. F. Wedd, M. Ray Adams, and J. M. S. Tompkins, there is need to mention only her literary activities concerning the subject of women's rights through the 1790's⁴. Her first work, significantly a controversial pamphlet, by “Eusebia”, comprised Cursory Remarks on Gilbert Wakefield's Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public Worship (1792). Among those who admired her work was the prominent, scholarly William Frend, one of the three or four men whom Mary rather daringly and unsuccessfully courted⁵. When George Dyer brought to her Mary Wollstonecraft's newly published Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she sought out the author and became an ardent disciple. Her miscellany, Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793), betrays this new adherence in its expressions of admiration. In view of her later comments on William Enfield's Monthly Magazine article, there is interest also in her citing his History of Philosophy⁶. Mary Hays's fledgling book, with its inserted poems, tale, and essays—several reprinted from the Universal Magazine—led to her further association with the literati of London, including Godwin, and to her reviewing in such monthlies as the Critical Review and the Analytical Review. An important figure on the Analytical was Mary Wollstonecraft. After Mary Wollstonecraft's return from France, dejected by the desertion of the American Gilbert Imlay, Miss Hays became her close friend in 1795. She deeply regretted an unfortunate coolness which had resulted from the Wollstonecraft-Godwin meeting in 1791 and managed to reintroduce them in January 1796. Although unaware of the steady ripening of their relationship into intimacy, she appears to have approved of their marriage on March 29, 1797.⁷ Some critics have carelessly alleged that Mary Hays had been in love with Godwin, who had allowed her to send him long “philosophical” and sentimental letters, several of which were inserted into her novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796)⁸. In reality, a careful reading of the book and of the evidence shows Godwin as cast in the role of a “trusted friend”, i.e., the philosopher, Mr. Francis, who warned “Emma-Maria” about the danger of mentally indulging her unreciprocated amour. The real object of her passion this time was apparently William Frend, just as Charles Lloyd would become the object in 1799. (The latter was to mock her rather callously in his novel Edmund Oliver, which represented a break with Jacobinical ideas as well as liberal friends, such as Godwin⁹.) In 1796, Mary, still single, was apparently eager for a discussion of the prejudicial position of women in society.

A good point of departure was the anonymous “Enquirer” series beginning in the first issue of the new liberal journal, the Monthly Magazine, published by the well-known Richard Phillips, February 1796¹⁰. Phillips had engaged Dr. William Enfield, former tutor at Warrington Academy, adviser to Ralph Griffith of the Monthly Review, to which he contributed, and author of the very popular schoolbook, The Speaker, and Institutes of Natural Philosophy, as I have indicated above¹¹. According to Godwin's manuscript journal, he had met him in 1794¹²; Godwin was sure to note Enfield's use of the Enquiry concerning Political Justice in “Enquirer” Nos. 1 and 4 (February and May 1796). In turn, Godwin probably used the title of his series for his own book of essays, The Enquirer, being written during 1796¹³. Godwin could have had no doubt about Enfield's authorship, which must have been an open secret to the liberal literati of London, including Mary Hays (she is mentioned in his journal for visits received or paid at least twice in 1795, thirty-seven times in 1796, and twenty-three times in 1797). In fact, in Enfield's obituary notice in the Monthly Magazine of November 1797, the editor John Aikin wrote: “His cast of thoughts was free, enlarged and manly, as was proved in The Enquirer, which so much gratified the liberal readers of the Monthly Magazine¹⁴.”

At this time Mary Hays was seeking an important forum for presenting her candid and fervent views on the invidious position accorded women by an unjust society. Enfield's first topic was provocative: “Ought the Freedom of Enquiry to be restricted?” He gave the standard answer of the Rational Dissenters. Every man has a natural right to enquire after truth. It is a birthright, manifested by man's curiosity, enriched by experience. Diminish a person's ideas and you reduce his humanity and bring him closer to the animals. As knowledge and truth advance, so does the happiness of society. It is the evil policy of government to conceal the truth and to discourage enquiry. Here Enfield, obviously drawing his argument from Godwin, cites the Enquiry concerning Political Justice on the consequences of the removal of “all restriction and discouragement from enquiry” (I, 4). He concludes with a firm hope that man's progress will not be “retarded by coercive restrictions”. Thus far Enfield says nothing on the subject of the special restrictions placed upon the education of women. But the editor either deliberately or coincidentally printed a letter from “J. T.” in the same issue (I, 26-29), consisting largely of quotations from two opposing sides of a related question—whether all men's capacities at present are indefinitely or unreservedly susceptible to that educational development which will improve his physical and moral condition and achieve a foreseeable “perfection”. Helvetius's Treatise on Man would naturally serve to present complete environmentalism and the denial of inborn inequalities. Long quotations from the translation by Hooper are given, to the effect that man's personality is only “the product of his education”, interpreted as the total of impressions impinging upon sensibility¹⁵. In this view a Newton or a Shakespeare is merely the effect of numerous, unfathomable but none the less external causes which, if exactly duplicated, might produce a like product. To support his own belief in inborn differences of memory, judgment, and imagination, “J. T.” counterposes a paragraph from Juan Huarte de San Juan, whose work on the growth of intelligence had had much publicity and popularity throughout Europe, including England, where Richard Carew in 1594 and later (1698) Edward Bellamy had issued translations of this “educational classic¹⁶”. It is the Bellamy translation (1734 ed.) that is cited to prove that inborn predispositions of mind or personality make the young students fit for certain subjects, such as languages, or logic, or astronomy; to force them into the wrong discipline is to doom them to misery and failure. Huarte's psychology is rooted in the medieval theory of the four humors and the notion of the disciplinary value of different subjects; nonetheless Huarte may be given credit for a good statement of “professional orientation¹⁷”. It is not surprising that his work was still being cited when we consider that the very popular Lavater gives four pages to eighteen “aperçus” drawn from his pages, several with critical comments, in the fifth volume of Physionomie¹⁸. Among the London literati Lavater was well known, for the standard translation was that of Thomas Holcroft (1789), and Mary Wollstonecraft herself had prepared an abridgment for Joseph Johnson, though it had not been published¹⁹.

In April 1796, “Enquirer III” raises a different aspect of the great issue, whether all mankind can be ameliorated: “Are Literary and Scientific Pursuits suited to the Female Character?” (I, 181-184). Enfield presents his balanced and, on the whole, pro-female viewpoint through a charming dialogue between the frivolous coquette Sophia, ironically named after the mate that Rousseau gave to Emile, and the sober female philosopher Eliza, who admirably presents her case for producing enlightened mothers and wives. The arbiter is Aunt Margaretta, who favors a cultivated understanding, providing “the imagination and affections” are not neglected. Plain Mary Hays, as we shall see, must have identified herself with Eliza²⁰. The May 1796 issue included a letter from “Christiana” discussing Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written … in Sweden, Norway and Denmark of January 1796 (I, 278-296). This criticizes two phrases which, in their carelessness, vitiate the effectiveness of the work of a “writer of considerable eminence”. The letter shows the importance attached to Mary Wollstonecraft's name, as well as the editorial balance in presenting varied viewpoints.

The opponents begin to join forces in the issue of May 1796, with the printing of a letter from “A. B.”, animadverting on “Enquirer III” (I, 289-290). Briefly he notes that “women ought to be better educated than they are” but denies that they equal men in mental power. Often their education has equaled Shakespeare's but never has there been his female equivalent. This item was bound to feed the flames of the debate, and Mary Hays had already prepared for the June 1796 issue a long letter, signed “M. H.”, attacking Mr. “J. T.” (I, 385-387). She defends the ability of everyone to learn anything through “use and exercise”, speaking of “natural fitness” as an “occult phrase” and of the “notion of innate ideas” as “obsolete”. Yet, at that very time, her mentor Godwin, whose Political Justice of 1793 she was echoing here, was in the process of revising his basic ideas about innate aptitudes²¹. Although environments may differ for all individuals, she admits, yet the major influences come from the climate of opinion induced by the prevailing government, as Helvétius has maintained²². Briefly and not very skillfully she summarizes Godwin's sketch of the development of perception through the external stimulation of the senses. As a novelist, she characteristically emphasizes the need for tracing the development of motives and the “progress” of one's opinion. The notion of inborn powers is “monstrous and hypothetical”. “Virtues as well as talents are the product of education.” Hence why seek for virtuous qualities in statesmen, brokers, or lawyers, she asks, as though she has read Godwin's startling essay, “Of Trades and Professions”, in The Enquirer (pp. 212-239), even now aborning. The melodramatic Mary Hays then wrenches out of context from Godwin a concept basic to her own stormy and man-hunting career: “The true methods of generating talents are to rouse attention by a lively interest, by a forcible address to the passions, the springs of human actions.”

Two magazine numbers later, in July 1796, Mary is apparently attacking “A. B.'s Strictures on the Talents of Women”, signing herself simply “A Woman”. The sentiments, style, and allusions to Political Justice are characteristic of her work. A passage from Godwin's work on the development of mind from “absolute ignorance” through impinging impressions is first given. She grants the preponderance of male geniuses in the history of intellectual attainments, but then tacitly raises the argument of Mary Wollstonecraft, that women have both a neglected and a “perverted” education. The same attack upon Rousseau's “eccentric and erroneous opinions” is made²³ in language which is more impassioned than eloquent: “Endeavours were still made to sophisticate and entangle the truths which could no longer be suppressed” (II, 470). Perhaps self-consciously the very plain Mary Hays ends with a sarcastic denial for womankind of any wish to be at once “the most lovely and the wisest part of the human species”.

The August 1796 issue contains an attack upon the letter of “A Woman” from “C. D.”, initials which suggest a staff writer's contribution, since there would not have been time for a reader to have sent in his reply for the issue of the following month. Moreover, we now have anti-feminist replies, first from “A. B.” and then from “C. D.”. This also provides evidence that the magazine sought a balance of views, for the writer calls the quotation from Godwin “turgid inanity”. He seizes upon “A Woman's” admission of inborn inequality of strength between man and woman to expound upon a probable native difference in intellect, which is associated with decreased opportunities, he says, for “cultivating the intellect enjoined by the needs and cares of pregnancy and motherhood” (II, 526-527). Such arguments, of course, goad feminists beyond the bounds of cool, logical refutation. Immediately following this letter is another from “T. S. N.” on the allied subject of Hume's denial that “physical causes” of air and climate “influence the genius and nature of Man” (II, 527-530). The writer regards Hume's arguments as “plausible rather than valid”, but finally concludes that physical causes may, indeed, be counteracted by others which are more powerful, at least in civilized society. Soon this phase of the topic will be absorbed into the feminist conflict.

The September issue brings a contribution from a new polemicist, ironically named “Philogynes”. In a good piece of satire he contends that we too often regard talents as manifested best by works of literature or eloquent speeches, whereas the persuasion wrought by “a smile, a glance of the eye, or a very few words” clearly shows women to be the superior sex. Men can rebel against that superior power only as celibates or “worn-out batchelors”, proof of women's supremacy of talents (II, 611-612). A more serious rejoinder, specifically to the previous defense of Helvétius by Mary Hays, is made by “S. R.” in the same issue (p. 629). He contends that “all arguments deduced from experience and analogy” are directly “opposed to the fashionable philosophy of Helvétius”. Since the organs of different individuals vary, why cannot the brains differ in size and consistency, thereby altering the capacity to reason. Moreover, the Jesuits, cited by “M. H.”, certainly study the dispositions of their pupils from the beginning of their training. In the next issue, “A. B.” joins the fray again (II, 696-697), specifically answering the May, 1796 letter of “A Woman”. With deft sarcasm he raises the old argument of the need to attend to the home and the children rather than to intellectual pursuits; asks why Queen Elizabeth, so educationally privileged, could not surpass Shakespeare and Bacon; and finally generously opens up the field for intellectual development to the women with leisure and finances, while yet maintaining women to be, on the average, mentally inferior to men.

This letter, whether “planted” or actually received, was clearly intended to stimulate further discussion. This came in the November 1796 issue, again from “A Woman”, whose long letter (II, 784-787) is chiefly a lively refutation of “C. D.'s” note in the August issue; this scarcely proves male “superiority”, she sarcastically asserts. She uses the Helvetian concept of human beings as “similarly and commonly well organised” to deny that marked inferiority of structure may, indeed, produce an “ideot” (sic). More important is the social tendency to imitate and follow powerful examples—a fact which may justify Hume's depreciating physical causes in favor of the social or the moral causes. (Clearly, she has paid attention to the intervening letters on allied topics.) Women have been deprived of rational education and of the incentives fostering a Shakespeare or a Newton. Using Godwin's phrases she declaims against the “odious and pernicious … monopoly of mind” by men, upon whom she calls to open the field of enquiry for both sexes. Her postscript objects to the narrow definition of “education” applied by “A. B.” in citing Shakespeare versus Queen Elizabeth. A little coda appears in the December issue in “A Woman's” correction of misplaced quotation marks in her excerpt from Hume (II, 850).

At the beginning of 1797 there was no decrease in the controversy among these epistolists, for “C. D.” returns with a blunt denial of woman's equality and a complaint that “A Woman” has somehow brought the equality of all mankind into an argument which rested upon the differences of the two sexes. He also declares a sentence about considering non-appearing causes as “not existing” to be both meaningless and undiscoverable in Hume's “Essay on National Character”, this last being “C. D.'s” manifest error (III, 4). The Monthly Magazine's editor himself, in February, indicates the provenance of the sentence in Hume's revised edition of the “Essay”; this is certainly a kindly solicitude for the reputation of his female correspondent²⁴.

The last two installments in the controversy are those of Mary Hays, or “M. H.”, indicating either a suppression of opposing letters or growing loss of interest in the theme. In March 1797, the opening suggests a contrived debate: “I am encouraged by your insertion of my defence of the talents of women, in reply to the strictures of A. B. and C. [she omitted the suitable ‘D.’] to address you, etc.” (III, 193-195). Citing “an eloquent advocate for the rights of her sex” (probably Mary Wollstonecraft), she pleads against the artifice and despotism of female education and augurs later ideas of Godwin, advocate of candor, in the view that such an education is “enough to destroy” the “whole character” and “to poison the whole community”. Women's financial dependence upon men, leads to marriage for “mercenary and venal motives (the worst kind of prostitution)”. Within the confines of one paragraph, she traces the decline and fall from virtue of a wife subject to a capricious despot, epitomizing the plight of Jemima in Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman and her own Emma Courtney (1796). While the ensuing depravity is deeply entangled with the system of property (Godwin's contention in Political Justice, Book VIII, although not footnoted by Miss Hays here) yet “its deplorable consequences” can be lessened by an improved “female Education”. She proposes a training for the “trades and professions” which are suitable for women, to enable marriage to be less mercenary in motive; family support may then be shared by both partners. She ends on a note drawn from the first edition of Political Justice, that government must ensure that “one moral and mental standard is established for every rational agent”. Mary seems unaware that Godwin has dropped this expectation of a fundamentally vicious establishment, from his second edition²⁵).

Her next letter, of May, 1797, on the subject of talents shows a new humility and consciousness of weakness of argument, which is probably the result of the shift in opinion in Godwin's latest work, The Enquirer (III, 359-360). Here he had begun to retract his view of the absolute equality and “tabula rasa” purity of all minds or “organs of perception” at birth²⁶. Mary herself speaks of the preface to the work of this “eloquent philosophic writer”. The resultant article by her is a potpourri of borrowed statements about the connection of knowledge and virtue, of mental powers and lively sensations, of sense and reason, of talents and power, and finally of hampering government and the need for free enquiry. Her interest in motives causes her in conclusion to allude to Godwin's tracing “the principles” of mind. Her admiration of The Enquirer, incidentally, is echoed in August, 1797 (III, 119), in the Monthly Magazine's “half-yearly retrospect of the state of Domestic Literature” asserting that Godwin correctly “wishes to make all men, children of reason” through reform in education and in manners in general.

Following this psychological interest, “M. H.” made her penultimate contribution in September 1797 (IV, 180-181). It is an interesting defense of novel-writing in the interregnum between her own two novels, Emma Courtney and Victim of Prejudice (1799). The first had been widely criticized for the indecorous, overly-susceptible Emma, who steadfastly pursues the diffident Augustus Hartley for years, to her own catastrophic end²⁷. The letter cites Johnson's view, in the Rambler, that “the most perfect models of virtue ought only to be exhibited”, for the impressionable readers. On the other hand, Johnson's view that “Vice should always disgust wherever it appears”, says Mary, ignores the gradations and mixtures of human character. In a passage that might have been the kernel of Godwin's later famous explanation of how he wrote Caleb Williams (in his new preface to Fleetwood, as reprinted in 1832), Mary shows her intention as a novelist: “To describe life and manners in real or probable situations, to delineate the human mind in endless varieties, to develop the heart, to paint the passions, to trace the springs of action, to interest the imagination, exercise the affections, and awaken the powers of the mind.” It is not through contemplation of perfect beings that we learn but rather through “tracing the pernicious consequences of an erroneous judgment, a wrong step, an imprudent action, an indulged and intemperate affection … How deep is our regret, how touching our sympathy, how generous our sorrow, while we contemplate the noble mind blasted by the ravages of passion, or withered by the canker of prejudice!” Every contemporary reader would be prepared for her summarizing allusion to the character of Ferdinando Falkland in Caleb Williams. She concludes: “Fictitious histories, in the hands of persons of talents and observation … would become a powerful and effective engine of truth and reform.” Here we can see the social and literary credo of Mary Hays, novelist.

It is interesting to note the way in which the Monthly Magazine treated Mary Hays's two novels, one of which fell within the period of her letters on the female cause. In the “Half-yearly Retrospect” of January 1797 (III, 47) we find a single sentence on the first: “Miss Hays's Emma Courtney, written to show the danger of indulging extreme sensibility, is an interesting and instructive performance abounding with just and liberal sentiments, and evidently the production of a well-cultivated and enlightened mind.” Surely Mary was satisfied with this judgment. Her second novel was heralded by the magazine in December 1798 (VI, 456) as follows: “Miss Hays will speedily publish her long expected Victim of Prejudice which has only been delayed by the printer. The lady is at present engaged upon a biographical work of great and lasting interest to the female world, to contain the lives of illustrious women of all ages and nations …” When the novel finally came out, the Monthly's “Retrospect” in July 1799 (VII, 542) called it a “pathetic and instructive story, displaying its author's strong natural powers, and an unrestricted freedom of thinking, which to some timid spirits may give displeasure. We confess that with us Miss Hays is a favourite author, although, in the present volumes, if we had time and room, we could point out several parts which are objectionable”. The growth of anti-Jacobin abuse against liberal works was making the staff more cautious, as its occasionally sharp criticism of Godwin's new publications at the turn of the century shows.

It is fitting that the name of Mary Hays should be signed for the first time in the Monthly Magazine in connection with the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, her chief inspirer in the cause of women's rights. Godwin's wife died on the 10th of September 1797, ten days after the birth of little Mary. Indeed, Mary Hays had been called in by the distraught husband to help nurse his wife at the end²⁸. In the September issue of the Monthly (pp. 232-233) appears an anonymous obituary notice, by Mary Hays, which quite naturally emphasizes her “exertions to awaken in the minds of her oppressed sex a sense of their degradation” One assumes that she is not straying from her Helvetian convictions in speaking of Mrs. Godwin's “admirable talents and … masculine tone of understanding”. We recognize many of the threads in her previous articles, as when she notes Mary's perception of “those partial evils, destructive to virtue and happiness, which poison social intercourse and deform domestic life”. The only demerit—and it is only tangentially mentioned—is Mary's attempted suicide. No one reading her eulogy could fail to perceive the distress of a loyal friend and disciple. Obviously she was proud of the notice, for in the issue of October 1797 (p. 245), she speaks of her “desire and intention” to affix her name in respect and affection for her “late admirable friend”. She apologizes for not giving further particulars, which will be furnished to the public soon “by a far abler hand”, namely, Godwin's in Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps one should also note that the Monthly provided a second obituary notice, of one paragraph, in July 1798, alluding to the Memoirs and Posthumous Works, which had been published in the interim (V, 493-494). This one is colder in style than that of Mary Hays, who obviously did not write: “She had faults and transcendant virtues, but let us not examine her frailties now²⁹.

After the death of Mary Godwin, the friendship of Mary Hays and Godwin waned and visits became rather infrequent³⁰. The Godwin journal records the following references to Mary Hays: 1798, four; 1799, five; 1800, two. Mary was no less devoted, however, to the great causes which had engaged her attention in the Monthly Magazine series: women's rights and the enlightenment of mankind. We find her, for example, visiting Joseph Johnson in prison, to which he had been sent for publishing the “seditious” pamphlet of Gilbert Wakefield—her former contestant of 1792. The last of her letters to the editor of the Monthly Magazine was published in July 1800 (IX, 523-524), in affirmation of two enlightened articles on the nature of mania, by her friend Dr. John Reid, with her name signed. The final sentence is characteristic: “Any mental emotion indulged to excess may … induce maniacal derangement³¹”. She returns to her major theme in Female Biography (1803), announcing in the Preface: “My pen has been taken up in the cause, and for the benefit, of my own sex, and their advancement in the grand scale of rational and social existence … A woman who, to the graces and gentleness of her own sex, adds the knowledge and fortitude of the other, exhibits the most perfect combination of human excellence³².” Clearly, to Miss Hays, because of their sensibility, women are not merely men's equals but actually the superior half of humankind. Since the female biographies were of the illustrious dead of the distant past, Mary should not be contemned for omitting her friend Mary Wollstonecraft. Nor should she be blamed for writing two short tracts in 1815 and 1817 in the style of Hannah More; since the start of her career in 1792 with the pamphlet on public worship, she had never adopted the blantantly anti-religious opinions of Godwin and Holcroft.

The proof of this moderation despite the savage attacks upon her is, perhaps, her continued friendship with Henry Crabb Robinson, who offers the best sketches of Mary Hays in the nineteenth century: her failure in 1813 to reside at Southey's home as her “too sentimental letter” had tried to arrange and her “over-strained sensibility joined to precise manners” which will make her offensive and ridiculous to many intrinsically “below herself”; his seeing more of her, in 1819, in Pentonville, and finding her “correct in her conduct”, of a “kind disposition”, now become “more cheerful and agreeable in company, being less sentimental”; her death, in 1843, she being “a very worthy woman”, very “liberal in her opinions” in which she “had stuck fast³³”. Robinson's allusion to Mary's friendship with Southey offers an opportunity to indicate the opinion of the Poet Laureate in May 1799, not long after the period of the Monthly Magazine articles. Southey thought Charles Lloyd much at fault for reading to friends with jests his correspondence with Mary Hays, who was being deliberately deceived about his feelings. Later in the year Southey wrote to Coleridge: “She is worth seeing. For, with all her mistaken notions, she has genius, more than most of the lady writers.” Soon afterwards, he wrote again: “She is a woman perhaps erroneous in all points of first importantce, but a woman of talents and I believe of a good and warm heart. I like and esteem her … one of those persons whom twenty years hence it will be pleasant and gratifying to have seen³⁴”. Perhaps the additional “sight” of Mary Hays afforded to us through her uncollected articles in the Monthly Magazine will confirm Southey's opinion and give us a sense of the sincerity and fervor of her feelings on one of the great issues of her day.

Notes

1. My gratitude should be expressed to the ACLS and the New York State University Research Foundation for grants which enabled me to consult materials in the British Museum, April, 1968.

2. M. Ray Adams, Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism (Lancaster, Penn., 1947), Ch. III, “Mary Hays, Disciple of William Godwin”, pp. 83-103, mentions: “Her controversy on Helvetius with several correspondents in the Monthly Magazine … see numbers for February, June, and September of 1796 and January of 1797 (p. 90)”; these months are inaccurate. See J. M. S. Tompkins, The Polite Marriage (Cambridge, 1938), “Mary Hays Philosophess”, pp. 150-187; for her reiteration of Southey's information about her writing in the Monthly Magazine, see, p. 179.

3. Charles Cuthbert, Southey, ed., The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (New York, 1851), p. 96.

4. A. F. Weed, The Love Letters of Mary Hays (1779-1780) (London, 1935), summarizes her life, pp. 1-13, and also gives letters exchanged by Mary Hays, William Frend, and William Godwin, pp. 220-248.

5. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers (London, 1938), I, 5 and 235 lays the pursuit and rejection entirely to Frend's account.

6. Letters and Essays, pp. v-vi, 11, 26, 28, 106, 183-184, and 14.

7. Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1966; reprint of 1951), pp. 259-260. See also his Godwin and Mary (Lawrence, Kansas, 1966), for many references to Mary Wollstonecraft's letters.

8. E.g., C. B. A. Proper, Social Elements in English Prose Fiction between 1700 and 1832 (Amsterdam, 1929), p. 196.

9. Kenneth Curry, ed., New Letters of Robert Southey (London, 1965), I, 187-188. For Lloyd's “apostacy” see Edmund Oliver (Bristol, 1798), I, 7-10, 114, 128-129, 151-152; II, 102-104 and also Lloyd's Letter to the Anti-Jacobin Reviewers (Birmingham, 1799), pp. 19-20.

10. The best study of the orientation and importance of the Monthly Magazine is by Geoffrey Carnall, Review of English Studies, N.S. V (April 1954), 158-164. For Phillips the inadequate DNB article is still the best source.

11. Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (London, 1930), pp. 210-211 and Cambridge History of English Literature, X, 385 and XIV, 399.

12. The journal was consulted in the Pforzheimer Library, in microfilm, through the courtesy of Lord Abinger and Mr. Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr.

13. The ascription of the period, of one year, February 1796 to February 1797 is made in Shelley and His Circle (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), I, 152 and confirmed by the daily journal entries.

14. Monthly Magazine, IV, 400-402. Lewis Patton also refers to this notice, in his reply, in the Review of English Studies, XVI (1940), 188-189, to Dorothy Coldicutt's effort to attribuate the “Enquirer” series to Coleridge, in the same periodical, XV (1939), 45-60.

15. W. Hooper, trans., Treatise on Man (London, 1810 reprint of 1777 ed.), pp. 3, 13-14, and 27-28.

16. Juan Huarte, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias … 1575, 1578, 1593; Leyden, 1593; Antwerp, 1603; Alcala, 1640; Leyden, 1652; Amsterdam, 1662; Madrid, 1668, London, 1590 (?), 1594, 1596, 1604, 1616; translated by Bellamy, 1698, 1734; Lyon, 1597; Paris, 1619, 1645, 1661; Lyon, 1668; Paris, 1675; Wittenberg, 1785; Venise, 1582, 1586, 1590, 1600.

17. See Elias F. Haiek, “Juan Huarte: iniciador del estudio de la individualidad”, pp. 3-12 in Museo Social Argentino (Buenos Aires, 1933), especially, p. 6.

18. Johann Kaspar Lavater, L'art de Connaître les hommes par la Physionomie (Paris, 1807), V, 49; VI, 105-112. The original version, of 1775-1778 in German, was dedicated to H. Fuseli, then Lavater's close friend and fellow reformer in Zurich and, as London artist, the object of Mary Wollstonecraft's ardent attention in 1792.

19. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 107.

20. Frequently cited is Coleridge's letter of January 25, 1800, to Southey, calling Mary Hays “A Thing, ugly & petticoated …”, q.v. in Earl Leslie Griggs, Collected Letters of … Coleridge (Oxford, 1956), I, 563.

21. Political Justice, Book I, Ch. IV, given in F. E. L. Priestley's edition (Toronto, 1946), III, 141-142; for discussion see III, 95-96, and my Education and Enlightenment in the Works of … Godwin (New York, 1962), pp. 26-27.

22. She cites the Hooper translation of De l'Homme: II, Ch. V, 102-106; X, 171-179: XI, 179-181.

23. See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1929), Ch. II, p. 23 and V. p. 88.

24. For the full text see The Works of David Hume (Boston, 1854), III, p. 224.

25. Political Justice (1793), I, IV, section 3, deleted in 1796; given in Priestley's edition, III, 245-247, and discussed at length in Education and Enlightenment, Chapters I and II.

26. See Priestley, Introduction to Political Justice, III, 95-96, and David Fleisher, William Godwin (New York, 1951), pp. 119-124.

27. She received a full share of anti-Jacobinical abuse, directed chiefly against Godwin. See B. Sprague Allen, Modern Philology, XVI (August 1918), 57-75, “The Reaction Against William Godwin”, specifically, p. 60. Miss Hays was the particular target of Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, in the character of Bridgetina, as is stated in the 1802 French translation's preface. For a full discussion of the pointed parallels with and borrowings from Godwin see Jean de Palacio, “La Fortune de Godwin en France: Le Cas d'Elizabeth Hamilton”, Revue de Littérature Comparée, XLI (1967), 321-341.

28. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 305.

29. However, the notice of Mary Godwin by Mary Hays in the Annual Necrology, 1797-98 (London, 1800), pp. 411-420, was much “more restrained and apologetic” than this earlier one, as Wardle, ibid., p. 322, notes.

30. It ceased in 1800 according to A. F. Wedd, op. cit., p. 10. See Shelley and His Circle, I, 141, for a letter from Godwin to Mary Hays, of October 22, 1797, concerning a quarrel which will preclude “intimacy” but not friendship.

31. Dr. Reid's contributions to the journal were VIII (December 1799), 876-877; IX (November, 1800) 342-345; and IX (June, 1800), 427-429. Her approval of his views may reflect her friendship for one who had bitterly reviewed Lloyd's attack in Edmund Oliver for the Analytical Review, as H. C. Robinson, op. cit., I, 5, reports.

32. Female Biography (1st American edition, Philadelphia, 1807; from London ed., 1803), Preface, pp. iii and iv. Richard Phillips, publisher of the Monthly Magazine, published this work.

33. H. C. Robinson, op. cit., I, 124-125, 131, 234-235; and II, 629.

34. Kenneth Curry, ed., New Letters of Robert Southey (New York, 1965), I, 210 and 215.