SOURCE: Tompkins, J. M. S. The Polite Marriage, pp. 150-90. London: Cambridge University Press, 1938.

[In the following excerpt, Tompkins analyzes how Hays's notably brash, Godwinian character and philosophical beliefs are reflected in her novels, particularly The Memoirs of Emma Courtney.]

Of all the small writers whom [we] commemorate, Mary Hays is the least likely to be quite forgotten. This is not because of the quality of her literary work, which is, with the exception of The Scotch Parents, the worst we have handled, since she rejected the discipline of eighteenth-century taste and acquired no other; but because she passed many years of her life on the edge of a circle that is still intrinsically interesting to us. She was the occasion of characteristic utterances by Lamb, Southey and Coleridge, and is to be found modestly posted in explanatory footnotes to their correspondence. She knew Mary Wollstonecraft, and was counted by the Anti-Jacobin among those “philosophesses” who blasphemously controverted the real nature of woman in their vindication of her political and economic rights; and she deposited a great deal of confidence in the cool bosom of William Godwin. Her novels, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice, are occasionally cited as documents in the history of feminism; and recently a collateral descendant, Miss A. F. Wedd, has published a selection from the love-letters of her girlhood, followed by the letters addressed to her in middle life by Mrs Eliza Fenwick, with an introduction based on family papers.¹ What follows is little more than a leisurely reconsideration of all this material, paying less attention to her not very important contacts with the romantic poets than to her self-portrait in Emma Courtney, that astonishing blend of complacence and a white sheet.

[Mary Hays and Elizabeth Griffith] were born within about thirty years of each other, but the cleft between their two generations was more than usually deep, and the difference in temperament between them is reinforced by differences in modes of thought and expression. Mrs Griffith had asserted that the only philosophy a woman ought to have was resignation. Miss Hays was strenuously philosophical and not at all resigned. She was a Godwinite, measuring right and wrong by the scale of social utility. She accepted the mechanical theory of the Universe and managed to harmonize it with Christianity. Her mouth was full of catchwords and quotations, and she did, with painful labour and some sophistication, seek to understand what happened to her in the light of these beliefs; but in the contortions with which she accepted her fate resignation was the last posture she tried. Hers is the clamour of constant outrage. A distempered civilization has wronged her; she has a case to bring against the prejudices of society; and the brawling, repetitive egoism with which she brings it contrasts strongly with Mrs Griffith's plaintive delicacy. Confession was at once a need of her nature and her strongest weapon of offence. Her scientific interest in her own case quelled shamefastness as it must have quenched her sense of humour and her fear of ridicule; moreover the consequences of injustice must be exhibited in order that justice may be done. In her lifetime her friends bore the brunt of her vehement and undesired candour; and now she has found another ear.

“You never wrote … an all-of-the-wrong-side sloping hand, like Miss Hayes” (sic), says Lamb in a letter to George Dyer. The tiny fact, thrown out in a soothing, mirthful expostulation with the ruffled Dyer, who had been pricked by an allusion to his hieroglyphics, rejoices the heart as that of Edmund Gosse was rejoiced when he found it recorded that Joseph Warton read the Communion Service in a remarkably awful manner. Its appropriateness is perfect. Her reaction from the ethics of womanhood as the eighteenth century had understood them, from reserve, complaisance and submission, had indeed sent Miss Hays sloping all of the wrong side. Her chance of establishing herself in an upright position, never very good in one of her temperament, was destroyed when the death of her first lover and her repeated failures to attract another left her deepest needs unsatisfied; and in her quest for fulfilment she was led into acts of aggression that are a comic parody on the sexual honesty which her friends, the philosophers, declared to be more modest than concealment. None the less, she remained courageous, generous and determined to profit by her experiences. She looked forward to the emancipation of womanhood and the regeneration of society, and she looked steadily forward, unlike many of her friends, to a life beyond the grave. She was a grotesque, but, in the eighteenth-century meaning of the word, a respectable one.

Mary Hays was one of a family of sisters, and when she met John Eccles she was living with her widowed mother in Gainsford Street, Southwark. John Eccles lodged so near that, as their romance developed, they could communicate by signs from window to window; a book laid against hers meant that she was alone and could be visited, while his drawn curtain in the early morning, when she is already up and penning her daily letter, brings down on him an arch rebuke. They had met at chapel; both were liberal dissenters with a taste for a good sermon, but Eccles soon makes it clear that those provided at their place of worship would not ensure his attendance if it were not for the presence of Mary. She was then about nineteen, small—her short legs were to provide material for caricature—with few personal charms, as she sadly admitted in hope of contradiction, impulsive, enthusiastic, intermittently prudish, and very much occupied with her own sensibility. To Eccles she appeared “a little girl with dark hair and features soft as the peaceful messengers of heaven”, and he was very soon assuring her—assuring and reassuring became his daily portion—that compared with her not even Petrarch's Laura would attract a moment's attention from him. Their letters begin early in 1779, when she was about nineteen, and are soon charged with all the emotions of interrupted affection. John Eccles was without immediate prospects; his home was at Fordingbridge in Hampshire, where he had worked in his father's business, but his endeavours to enlarge and improve it had been checked by paternal disapproval, and he was now in London, lending some kind of unpaid or slightly paid assistance in a friend's office, with a good deal of time on his hands. Mr Eccles senior, when his son made known to him the state of his affections, refused to take the matter seriously, and Mrs Hays had to intervene to separate the lovers. There were at least two parting scenes, rich in emotion. Mary abstained from food for twenty-four hours and relinquished her night's rest in order to be in a fit state to bid John Eccles farewell; her apologetic lover found the flesh too weak to fulfil his part of the vigil; but he made amends by a description of his face in the morning. “I am now looking in the glass,” he wrote to the exigent and unhappy girl over the way, “and really I pity myself. I am observing the force of passion; in what strong colours it lives in every feature; how visible the marks of love and disappointment sit there.” They met and parted, but not for long. Mary was tenacious and Eccles was unemployed, and both were certainly in love. A clandestine daily correspondence began, of enormous bulk and inevitably monotonous quality, and presently there were clandestine excursions too, to Vauxhall and further afield to Greenwich. Sister Betsy aided and abetted, and the indulgent Mrs Hays, we must believe, turned a blind eye. No doubt even then Mary was ill to cross.

There is little intellectual substance in the letters and no literary grace. Yet the lovers plainly feel themselves to be cultivated people; they enjoyed mediocre sentimental poetry; Eccles called himself Mary's “literary beau” and was prepared to argue on behalf of the immortality of the soul from the evidence of dreams, while Mary already shows a taste for disputation. She meant to be a good girl and had to discuss the why and how. Their letters, then, show none of the reflective range of Henry and Frances, but they convey character, of an immature kind, with equal vigour though less pleasurably. Mary was, as Miss Wedd has observed, at once daring and prim; she committed herself to Eccles's keeping on country excursions, but at the least lover-like demonstration complained that he treated her with “extreme freedom” and anxiously probed his opinion of her delicacy. She was very much agitated over her delicacy and discussed it a good deal. She accepted it, as all educated girls of her generation did, as one of her most important obligations, for without delicacy what becomes of the civilizing function of women? But she was also sure of the importance of candour and sincerity. Delicacy probably meant restraint, but it could not mean concealment. Her inability to conceal, or to consider the sensibilities of others when her own were in full play, was a permanent trait of her character, and in later years transformed her conception of delicacy into a highly aggressive virtue; but she never ceased to use the word. At present, however, she had many scruples about the exact balance of the two qualities, and Eccles had often to compose them. He told her, in heartfelt compliment, that she had invariably been honest; she had never played the artful with him; he would “venture to oppose decent freedom against an affected reserve: the former is one of the loveliest parts of your character, 'tis where I see you with the most affectionate sensations.” Decent freedom, however, might not perhaps include embraces. “I cannot help thinking I was too passive last night (you know what I mean),” writes Mary with misgiving; “I cannot reconcile my conduct to those strict rules of delicacy which I had determined ever to adhere to.” Delicacy and a certain kittenish playfulness defeated candour when it came to putting a name to the sensations which absorbed her. She availed herself of asterisks or a simple cipher and reminds him in melting quotation that “May is the month of L 452!”

Eccles did not have an altogether easy time. He had to write every day, and he had to assure his Maria (sometimes Polly, but more often the statelier syllables) not only that he wanted to write, but that he had plenty to write about and would have plenty, however long the correspondence lasted. He had to digest, in a single missive from his lady, the most irritating suspicions and the most plaintive appeals for pity on behalf of “your poor little girl”, who “has been early initiated to sufferings”, and he was goaded into writing indignant letters which he sometimes tore up next day, and sometimes sent as a warning, accompanied by a remorseful postscript. She feared his displeasure with an excessive timidity and provoked it by her restless qualms. “Am I not a little monopolizing girl to confine you in this manner?” she writes, seeking to disarm censure by the implied flattery. “But you must forgive me, for as Mrs Digby says: ‘I cannot bear a rival in love or friendship.’” John forgave her. “All things considered, I think I am a good kind of young man,” he writes with meek humour. Once he was driven beyond his patience, and for some days tried to affect indifference to his little girl; but it was a vain expedient and most uncomfortable, for: “Whilst I looked at her with a countenance dégagée, the warmest perplexities reigned within.” Once or twice, too, he wrote her a manly and reasonable protest against their “petty tumults”, and presently he feels able to congratulate her on having overcome them. Their prospects also had brightened. Mary's tenacity had at last forced the family into action. One of her brothers-in-law had been pressed into service; acceptable proposals, including some sort of partnership for the young man, had been made to Mr Eccles senior, and by July 1780 Mary Hays and John Eccles were publicly engaged. What followed is quickly told. Eccles, whose health had given Mary cause for anxiety for some weeks, grew rapidly worse. It was thought that his native air might check the decline, and he prepared to leave London. Before he left, Mary went to his lodgings and sat by his bed. She never saw him again, nor did he even reach Fordingbridge. He died at Salisbury, in the house of a relation, in his last wanderings often calling on the name of “his dear Miss Polly Hays”, and attempting to sing or repeat a line or two of the hymns they had sung together in Chapel.

Mary received the news with the full violence of her nature.

Wild, distracted, and outrageous, I accused Providence, and my Creator! I stamped on the earth in an agony of despair, and made the house echo with my cries; at last my spirits were exhausted, and I sunk into insensibility and stupidity: for three days refused all refreshment—I shed no tears—my senses were confused—my head seemed disordered—I talked calmly but very incoherently—my eyes were fixed, and I scarcely changed my position.

Her friends were very naturally alarmed. Her mother permitted her to put on mourning for her lover, and she vowed never to quit it. The Eccleses invited her to Fordingbridge, and, while considering whether the visit would make her feel better or worse, and whether she wanted to feel better or worse, she began an impassioned correspondence with the eldest Miss Eccles. She was always fiercely competitive in her griefs, and was now concerned to prove that her loss was far greater than a sister's could be. “He was all I saw in the creation,” she wrote. “… May this heart cease to beat should it ever be capable of feeling emotions of tenderness for any other than its first, and only love.” She went to Fordingbridge in the autumn and vowed eternal fidelity to Eccles, kneeling on his grave. She was then twenty, and before a month is over, with that saving honesty that always struggles out from beneath her emotionalism, she is admitting that she has experienced some soothing moments, blended perceptions of scenery, conscious innocence and pride in the quality of her own tenderness. The Eccles family worked hard to entertain her. We hear of an excursion to the New Forest, to drink tea in a keeper's lodge and return by moonlight, and of discussions with Mr Eccles, in which the relative merits of Charles I and Cromwell were debated, and his Arminian principles wrestled politely with his young guest's Unitarianism. Mary liked Hampshire.

“The country abounds with murmuring brooks and purling streams, which you know are objects I am partial to,” she wrote to her mother, adding: “I am become quite a drinker of their ale, which I think very fine. In mentioning my amusements I forgot to tell you, that I have bought a little rabbit, which I have rendered quite tame; it eats out of my hands and sleeps in my chamber, in a basket of tow—he is now sitting by my side, munching some bran.—But how trifling is all this! how foreign to my heart! a heart labouring under mixed pain, and the deepest regrets! struggling with sorrow that dissolves it in tenderness and anguish.”

Her youthful vitality was reasserting itself, but the blow had been heavy. On the anniversary of her loss she is still wearing mourning and hoping for death. Devotion seemed her only refuge; she had loved John Eccles idolatrously, and he had been taken from her.

At this point we lose sight of the girl Mary Hays. When she reappears some eleven years later, it is as Eusebia, friend of philosophers, authoress of a pamphlet on public worship, “a disciple of truth”, according to her own description, “and a contemner of the artificial forms which have served but to corrupt and enslave society”. Eccles was not forgotten, but she no longer wore sables for him; indeed, if we may trust the caricature of her in Miss Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, her dress was eccentric and gaudy. The wig, which too precariously crowned Miss Bridgetina Botherim, cannot with certainty be brought home to Mary Hays, but when the ungentlemanly English Review called her “the baldest disciple of Mrs Wollstonecraft”, there was perhaps more than literary criticism to barb the taunt. She was aware that she was out of the ordinary, and felt that her eccentricities were the natural and not unsympathetic result of her experiences. In her Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793), she tells with altered circumstances the story of her own frustrated love. The heroine, like Mary, abandons herself to grief, till, shocked to perceive herself on the brink of hypochondria, she rallies her forces for a deliberate recovery. The impressions of her tragedy “became at length the remembrance of remembrances, and if they betrayed her into some little whimsicality of character, the deviations were such as to the humane and philosophic eye, tracing back effects to causes, rendered her more dear and interesting”. Her pen played a part in her convalescence, dimly seen in the scarcity of record. The love-letters, preserved, as Miss Wedd describes them, in a careful and beautiful transcription by Mary's friend, Mrs Collier, were edited by Mary herself with an introduction and notes. She embarked upon but failed to finish a tale, Edwin, which was to enshrine Eccles as its hero. We hear also of a criticism of the moral tendency of Werther, which was sent by a friend to the Universal Magazine and afterwards reprinted in the second edition of the English translation. But it was by way of her religious interests that Miss Hays climbed on to a wider stage. At some point the devotionalism that assuaged her grief for John Eccles must have stiffened into a course of solid reading. She belonged to a reasoning, intellectual sect and liked the forms of argument. When therefore the scholar and controversialist Gilbert Wakefield, whose religious views harmonized in general with her own, proposed his opinion that public devotions are in some sort a corruption of the act of worship, which should be solitary, inward and contemplative, Mary, though with some showy trepidation in her preface and conclusion, was able to write him a sensible rejoinder. Her little pamphlet, Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (1792), was well received by her dissenting friends and by the press. The English Review amiably referred to it as an “elegant and polite little performance”. Ministers and prominent laymen wrote to her, and the indulgent circle of friends and relations, which all records invite us to presume, was widened to include men of some public importance. The dissenting background—in particular the Unitarian background—is constant throughout her life. She knew the family of the Reverend Robert Robinson, and George Dyer, that absent-minded scholar, who had been tutor there, arranged a tea party for her to meet Dr Priestley. The Reverend Hugh Worthington of Salter's Hall encouraged her to write her Letters and Essays, and Dr Disney of Essex Street Chapel obligingly preached some sermons that she wrote. A long and polite letter came from Cambridge from a recent convert to Unitarianism, the mathematician and Hebrew scholar, William Frend, whose propagation of his new opinions had already cost him his tutorship at Jesus College, and was in a year's time to bring on him a prosecution in the Vice-Chancellor's Court and a sentence of banishment from the University. They had not then met, but, complimenting her on her “sentiments unsophisticated by scholastick learning”, he expressed the wish that they might one day discuss their common faith together. Meanwhile George Dyer had brought her Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, and, strongly stimulated by a manifesto which endeavoured, in her own words, to “restore degraded woman to the glory of rationality, and to a fitness for immortality”, she wrote to the author and presently made her acquaintance at the house of Johnson the publisher. A cool and friendly criticism of the Cursory Remarks, touching with a firm finger its passages of egoism, remains to prove the shrewdness and kindliness of the greater Mary. Both these last names are of great importance in the life of Miss Hays; from Mary Wollstonecraft she learnt that feminism which, in her own crude version, became her constant creed, and in William Frend she thought she saw a successor to John Eccles.

The painful affair with William Frend—if that may be called an affair where all the activity is on one side while the other remains distressed and repellent—took place before Mary Hays begins to move across the pages of Lamb and Southey. She had already, however, enrolled herself among the philosophers, the circle of literary thinkers in close sympathy with the French Revolution, whose social theories were given their most challenging and unmitigated expression in Godwin's Political Justice. This small circle overlapped the larger one of the liberal dissenters and entry into it must have been easy enough, especially as she could rely on the good offices of George Dyer. She was by now ripe for their society. Her busy, imitative mind had worked itself into many of their positions—had indeed, we suspect, occupied them with a joyous leap. Letters and Essays, a book whose title-page is adorned by Socrates and Burns, while Epicurus, Lavater, Rousseau, Hartley and “the excellent Dr Priestley” enrich its pages, contains some emphatic avowals of her new beliefs. “Our nature is progressive”, writes this “convert to the doctrines of materialism and necessity”; and again: “The doctrine of mechanism inspires also charity and forbearance. A Necessarian may pity, but he cannot hate.” It is plain, too, that she has accepted from Mary Wollstonecraft the idea that the passions in their action unfold reason; it was a useful notion to her.

Another axiom of the Vindication, that independence is the soil of every virtue, probably accounts for her action in leaving home and living in lodgings in Hatton Gardens. The literal interpretation is characteristic of her. Whatever small patrimony or allowance she had was eked out by literary earnings. The circle she now moved in included many writing women, Mrs Inchbald, Mrs Barbauld, Miss Alderson and others, and, helped by Dyer, she got work on the Critical Review and elsewhere. It was early in 1795 that she met William Godwin. She had approached him in the preceding October by writing to ask for the loan of his book, Political Justice, which she was anxious to read, but could not get from the libraries nor afford to buy. The philosopher, to whom the request appeared rational, lent her his book and, according to Mary, invited her to “a free disclosure of [her] opinions in the epistolary mode”. One doubts whether the impulse really came from him, but he accepted the situation with kindness and discretion. She might write to him as much as she liked, but he was not to be expected to answer. He was a busy man, and a brief note or a call now and then was all he could spare. She took advantage of this concession to pour out to him the whole story of her pursuit of an unwilling man. There has been some doubt as to the identity of her quarry. Miss Wedd says that Mary withheld his name even from Godwin, but it seems unlikely that he did not know it, and Crabb Robinson is sure that it was Frend, who was by now settled in London, writing and teaching. “She confided to me on our first acquaintance that she was wretched,” he writes, “the consequence of an attachment where a union was impossible. … The man whom she accused of deserting her was William Frend.” And again: “Frend could not meet the love of Mary Hays with equal love. … Hence desertion.” Godwin himself has been proposed as the object of her affections; this Miss Wedd denies, and his appearance as Mr Francis in Emma Courtney does little to support the suggestion. He is there the astringent friend and monitor who opposes Emma, bewilders her and convicts her of error; and the picture reflects the slight chill that seems to have gone out from Godwin; he exercises her sensations without gratifying them, Emma says, and his manners repress even while they invite confidence. It is also to be considered that, when Godwin married Mary Wollstonecraft, Miss Hays was not one of the friends who were offended by that queer but happy union, but remained on friendly terms with them both. It is certainly possible that at some time in her headlong emotional career Godwin attracted her, but this can have been no more than a secondary affliction; the storms, the anguish, the pathetic, ridiculous obstinacy, were for another.

For the purposes of our impression of Mary Hays, however, it does not much matter who the beloved was. There was no interaction of personalities; he is seen dimly, an averted figure, through the shower of her protestations, the mists of her tears. The hero of Emma Courtney does not help us much. There is very little of him and what there is reminds us rather of Werther than of a Unitarian mathematician. There is no sign in either of her novels that she ever studied or understood a man. This man was the Object of her Sensibilities, but she was far more aware of them than of him. He remains then an undifferentiated Object, of whom it is difficult to predicate anything but embarrassment and a kindly temper. His humanity is evident in the final astonishing incident of this distressing affair. It had dragged on for years, but Mary had at last accepted his negative; he would not enable her to fulfil her capacities for devotion by attaching herself to him; he was deaf to the argument from social utility, and she must remain a frustrated being. She was crushed but not immobilized. Something yet remained for a philosophess to do and with considerable gallantry she undertook it. A letter to Godwin of 9 March 1796 recounts how, accompanied by a female friend, she went to call on him.

I made my friend announce and precede me to his apartment, and notwithstanding this precaution, which I conceived delicacy required, my entrance most completely disconcerted him (I had never, from motives easy to be conceived, visited him before)—“I am come (said I smiling) to call upon you for the exercise of less than a christian duty, the forgiveness, not of an enemy, but of a friend—I have no doubt been guilty of errors, who is free?”—I held out my hand—He took it, and replied to me, with a degree of cordiality. The past was no further alluded to.—I ask'd him, if he would, with our friend present, come and drink tea with me, to this he assented without hesitation. A few days since, they fulfilled their engagement, two other friends were also of the party. Whether he will ever think proper to call on me again, I know not, but as I conceived, I had not been faultless, and as it is particularly painful to me to cherish severe feelings, where I have before felt affection, I do not repent of what I have done, but feel myself relieved by it.

Mary could regard her behaviour with some complacence. It was rational and courageous; it was also extremely tenacious. William Frend would not marry her; he perhaps refused—if gossip and Emma Courtney are to be believed—to make her his mistress; he must then be firmly transplanted to the ground of friendship, or at worst acquaintance; somehow, at some angle, he must still be built into the fabric of her life.

Godwin's friendship and counsel were a great stay to her in this crisis. She covered vast sheets of paper to him, reporting her progress as a convalescent. Within a month of her acceptance of defeat she admits that she is better than she has been, “though certainly very far from happy”. Her self-esteem, never a very substantial structure, had been rudely shaken. She builds it up by insisting on her superior sensitiveness, on the ardour and importance of her affections. She dreads lest Godwin should lose patience with her, and wearies him still further with insistent explanations. She explains and explains, and some of the explanations are good. “I will confess, then,” she writes, “that I am not sufficiently disinterested to expect to be happy. I want a certain number of agreeable sensations for which nature has constituted me.” Some of them, on the other hand, are both trivial and elaborate. She perceives fine shades of disapproval or irritation in the behaviour of her friends and hastens with anxious humility to put things right. A pointer to one of her fusses is seen in a postscript to one of Godwin's notes: “I have not the slightest suspicion of you having disgusted Mr Holcroft by interrupting the discussion on Sunday by your departure.” A more notable occasion was the cold morning of 10 March 1796, the day after she had sent Godwin the letter describing her visit to Frend. She was lazily dressing by her sitting-room fire—not her usual custom as she eagerly explains—when Godwin entered the house to make an early call, and caught some glimpse of her in négligé as she fled across the passage—a misadventure to be laboriously accounted for in the epistolary mode the moment her toilet was complete. To Godwin she sent the first pages of Emma Courtney, and as she saw her novel take shape under her hands and read his guarded approval, she began to count her blessings. She was, at least, no longer convulsed by uncertainty. She could admit the balmy consolations still offered her by many gentle, benevolent spirits. She had been for a walk and enjoyed it.

I have the luxuries of cleanliness, of temperate plenty, I have moral and intellectual powers, I am free from the sting of remorse, I foster no corrosive nor malevolent passions—if there are any who have injur'd me, I wou'd return it only with kindness—And there are still some who look with an eye of tenderness on my faults, and who love my virtues—A gentle and kindly emotion swells my bosom—I am not miserable this evening!—How I prate to you of myself and my feelings!

The walk was perhaps in obedience to the counsels of George Dyer, given from a plane of intellectual acceptance to which she never climbed. “Pray take care of your health,” he wrote to her, apparently at about this time. “Do not be a martyr to philosophy, which you will be if you do not take more exercise, be a little more foolish, and look at the world with all its awkward things, its clumsy, lumpish forms, its fools, its cockscombs, and its scoundrels, with more endurance.”

The Memoirs of Emma Courtney was autobiographical to the point of including letters sent by the authoress to the “inflexible being”—a fact that was well-known to all her friends and all her enemies. She must have begun to write it immediately after she had received the final repulse, for it was published in the same year (1796). Its emotion therefore is not recollected in tranquillity. Crabb Robinson says that the book attracted attention as a novel of passion, but, though the description has a meaning in its historical context, it calls up to the modern reader comparisons that Emma Courtney is quite unfitted to sustain. Aphra Behn wrote novels of passion, and so did Charlotte Brontë, but Miss Hays's work has neither the social poise of the one nor the lyrical intensity of the other. She was not a real novelist. She had no invention; characters and scenes do not live in her imagination, except as incentives to discussion, and her dialogue speedily becomes a harangue. When she has to devise action, it is melodramatic and uninteresting, and, whereas it is certainly true that the subject of the book is a woman who passionately desires the love of a man, the exposition of that craving and of the starvation that underlay it was by way of pedantic analysis; an analysis, moreover, predominantly in the terms of mind, though we need not for that reason assume that Mary Hays was unaware of what was happening to her. The philosophers she knew insisted on the supremacy of mind over matter, and to one who had failed so notably to charm there must have been some consolation in shifting her appeal on to the grounds of intellect. Nevertheless, Crabb Robinson was doubtless right, and it was as a novel of passion by a woman that Emma Courtney was noticed. When in the second half of the eighteenth century women had taken publicly to their pens, indulgent critics had expressed the hope that now the world would be treated to a picture of love from the woman's point of view. Hitherto, however, women novelists had been too much occupied with domestic ethics and romantic reverie, too closely bound by a conception of delicacy that regarded the avowal of passion as the mark of a bad, or at least an undisciplined, woman, to carry their analysis very far. Mary Hays was one of the first to break the taboo.

Emma Courtney was written for the “feeling and thinking few” and was offered to them as an essay in philosophic fiction, a contribution, through its study of the progress of one strong, indulged passion, to the science of human nature. It would be easy to go through the book picking out the sophistries, the betraying compensations, yet the impression that is strongest as one re-reads it is that of the blundering courage and the occasional shrewdness of the author. It was by no means wholly a self-justification; the heroine's hazardous experiment in taking upon herself the initiative in love-making was meant “to operate as a warning, rather than as an example”, and whilst there is some comfort in the thought that “it is the vigorous mind that often makes fatal mistakes”, there is nothing but naked self-knowledge in Emma's cry: “Alas! my own boasted reason has been, but too often, the dupe of my imagination.” It is true that Emma, marching into her confessional, carries with her something more of beauty, a greater cogency and composure of rhetoric, than belonged to her creator, even as she carries the knowledge that her love had wakened a response, a knowledge that Mary, once her girlhood was over, never enjoyed; but one cannot grudge the devotee of “utility” these few decorations.

The book has little plot, no more than is necessary to get the characters into position for the harangues, and to veil, with some slight show of decency, the conditions under which the letters were originally written. The incidents may be considered, as the author suggested, as illustrative of the workings of a distempered civilization, but this is probably not the aspect under which they will present themselves to the unprejudiced mind. The heroine, Emma Courtney, is the only daughter of a clever, dissipated man, and is brought up, happily enough, in the household of her aunt. There are touches here which pretty certainly reflect the author's girlhood. We are told of an impulsive, candid, vain, affectionate child, whose “tastes were all passions”, growing up in an indulgent household, surviving with some spirit the painful shock of the transition to school life and the more painful experience of shortened means and loss of friends. In the “melancholy and oeconomical retirement” to which the family are now relegated, her solace is the circulating library, where her rate of consumption is ten to fourteen novels a week. Fiction now bestirs itself, and Emma's father, conscious that he can make no provision for her, resolves at least to strengthen her mind for her conflict with society, by introducing her to solid reading and to society where she will hear free speculative discussion. Her reading, which begins with Plutarch's Lives, extends to Descartes, polemic divinity and Rousseau's Héloïse, which charms her by “the wild career of energetic feeling”. At her father's dinner table, where ladies do not have to retire before the talk becomes interesting—“a barbarous and odious custom”—she meets company that corresponds to the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle, and collects material for reflection. Her father's death terminates this phase of her history, and the break-up of her aunt's household makes her dependent upon a hitherto unknown uncle with a harsh overbearing wife, in whose house she improves her acquaintance with the philosopher, Francis, and is sought in marriage by a young physician, Montague, whose offer she rejects. Her innocent but unorthodox conduct with Francis exposes her to the censure of her relatives, and she leaves them to go and live with Mrs Harley, a widow, in whose son Augustus she is already deeply interested. Augustus is a lawyer who has given up his profession and lives upon a legacy of £400 a year which he will lose if he marries. He lectures Emma on astronomy and philosophy from his sick-bed, but does not show himself otherwise aware of her gathering emotions, and after he has returned to London she is constrained to explain them to him in a letter beginning: “Suffer me, for a few moments, to solicit your candour and attention.” The rest of the book consists largely of the letters in which she requests his affections, demonstrates why she ought to have them and systematically lays down the arguments that justify “the deviation of a solitary individual from rules sanctioned by usage, by prejudice, by expediency”. It is a situation, she feels, that involves all her future usefulness and welfare. It is necessary for her to be esteemed and cherished. She cannot satisfy herself by venerating abstract virtue.

“Is it possible”, she writes, with her emphatic punctuation, “that a mind like yours, neither hardened by prosperity nor debased by fashionable levity—which vice has not corrupted, nor ignorance brutalized—can be wholly insensible to the balmy sweetness, which natural unsophisticated affections, shed through the human heart? … I make no apologies for, because I feel no consciousness of, weakness. An attachment sanctioned by nature, reason, and virtue, ennobles the mind capable of conceiving and cherishing it: of such an attachment a corrupt heart is utterly incapable.”

She meets his probable rejoinders at each point, with the adroitness of a desperate jack-in-the-box. She may be idealizing him, she admits, but her sentiments are not the less genuine, and without some degree of illusion and enthusiasm life languishes. She concludes this summons to surrender with one prudent afterthought; will he inform her if his heart is free?

In the distress of spirit that follows his polite but to her mind inconclusive reply, she pours herself out to Francis, arguing down her recurrent misgiving about an action that she would by no means recommend to general imitation. “If the affections are, indeed, generated by sympathy, where the principles, pursuits and habits are congenial—where the end, sought to be attained, is—

‘Something than beauty dearer’

you may, perhaps, agree with me, that it is almost indifferent on which side the sentiment originates.” Nevertheless: “Those who deviate from the beaten track must expect to be entangled in thickets and wounded by many a thorn.” Through these thickets she plunges, courting, one feels, the longest thorns. “In company I start and shudder from accidental allusions, in which no one but myself could trace any application.” Her former frustration sharpens the edge of her anxiety. To what future, unconceived periods will the inscrutable Being who made her for an end, of which she believes herself capable, defer the satisfaction of a capacity which “like a tormenting ignis fatuus, has hitherto served only to torture and betray?”

From the melancholy into which she falls, in spite of Francis's philosophical ministrations, she is raised by the need of earning her living. She goes to London and begins work as a governess, and the “conscious pride of independence” does her good. Thus stimulated she writes to Harley again, admitting his right to be master of his own affections, but entreating him for an hour's frank conversation to put an end to all her doubts. “I would compose myself, listen to you, and yield to the sovereignty of reason. … I am exhausted by perturbation. I ask only certainty and rest.” This letter extracts from him a vague reference to obligations that constrain him, which she still refuses to consider final, and three months later she returns to the attack, begging him this time for his friendship and assuring him that she is capable of a disinterested attachment. “Why am I to deprive you of a faithful friend”, she asks unexpectedly, “and myself of all the benefits I may yet derive from your conversation and kind offices? I ask, why?” For a time they meet for reading and discussion of impersonal questions, but this attempt to rise above “the prejudices that weaken human character” is defeated by Emma's unsleeping determination to extract Harley's secret from him as the only means to her peace. Under her remonstrances he becomes “captious, disputatious, gloomy and imperious”, and is at last driven to admit a prior attachment. Emma, who hitherto under every repulse and coldness has resumed her pen, resumes it once more, to enforce the importance of unequivocal sincerity and to point out the harm his reserve has done her. “You have contemned a heart of no common value, you have sported with its exquisite sensibilities—but it will, still, know how to separate your virtues from your crimes.” After this Parthian shot of ungenerous generosity, she ceases to see him. In her wretchedness Francis comes to her aid once more, and she survives a low fever, and sets her face to the undelightful future. But the book does not end here. Fiction allowed of a more striking conclusion than life, and Emma meets Augustus Harley twice more. The first time is at his mother's death-bed, where they have a most exhausting scene during a thunderstorm, and Emma learns that he is married and the father of two children, but cannot avow his position publicly without forfeiting his income. Years pass before she sees him again, and then, when she has long been the calm and useful wife of the physician, Montague, and the mother of a daughter, a stranger is flung from his horse passing through the town. It is, of course, Augustus. In her husband's absence she takes him in, tends him with devotion exclusive of all her other duties and receives his dying confession. He had loved her all the time. The end of the book is rather startling; Montague's jealousy, when he hears of his wife's behaviour, leads him precipitately to seduction, child-murder and suicide. Mrs Wollstonecraft felt her sympathy stop at this place, and Mrs Robinson, also a novelist, declared that the husband should have been suffered to die a natural death. Mary Hays, however, meant to trace the chain of evil effects that depends from a “confused system of morals” and a tragic personal frustration. Even at this point she does not cease to afflict her heroine. Emma devotes herself to the education of her daughter and of Augustus Harley's surviving child. At fourteen the younger Emma dies, and then the prematurely old and sad woman learns that her adopted son is involved in an unhappy love affair. For his sake, she says with almost Brontesque intensity, she has “consented to hold down, with struggling, suffocating reluctance, the loathed and bitter portion [potion?] of existence”; for his sake, to sustain him in his struggles, to impress on him the paramount importance of candour, she unseals her lips and tells him her story. By this device Mary Hays endeavoured to give an air of considered judgment and desolate calm to a book which was, in effect, an interim explosion of a permanently troublous temperament.

The parts of the narrative which diverge from the facts of autobiography need no comment; they are of a kind to explain themselves, and they are not the parts that attracted contemporary attention. Nor was it much directed to the “series of errors and mortification” which formed for Mary Hays the justification of her book, since they were intended to commend self-control; for Emma's misfortunes were quite overlooked in the glare of her deplorable enterprise. She, a female, pursued a male; not comically—at least in the author's intention—and not viciously—for even during the thunderstorm Emma calls on Augustus to acknowledge that her “wildest excesses had in them a dignified mixture of virtue”—but honourably and necessarily as an indispensable prerequisite to her social usefulness. The impressive letter, in which she “methodizes” under five heads all the objections that Augustus can possibly have to her and patiently refutes them one by one, was calculated to remain longer in the memory than her sad and humbled confession to Francis: “I am sensible, that by my extravagance, I have given a great deal of vexation (possibly some degradation) to a being, whom I had no right to persecute, or to compel to choose happiness through a medium of my creation.” A clumsy forerunner of the Shavian huntress woman, humourless, charmless, and too raw and unhappy to be really formidable, she made her attack not in the name of a mystical Life-Force but of General Utility. The mainspring of her activity, however, was not philosophic. What we see in Emma—what Mary Hays intermittently saw in herself—is the passionate temperament that seizes on the precepts of philosophy and forces them to subserve its own desires. “Philosophy, it is said, should regulate the feelings,” remarks Emma, “but it has added fervor to mine.” The notes of mournfulness and pride are mixed as she considers the tumult of her soul. All her life she has been a victim to the enthusiasm of her feelings, “incapable of approving or disapproving with moderation”, but in this vehemence she sees a great stimulus to mental growth. “What are passions, but another name for powers? The mind capable of receiving the most forcible impressions is the sublimely improveable mind.” It is with this sense of the enormous potential richness of her character that she reproaches Harley for rejecting “a mind like mine”, and points out that in arresting her natural affections he is guilty of the same crime as the ascetics of monastic institutions. When she turned to philosophy, she selected instinctively those precepts that would sanction the spontaneous habits of her temperament; the candour that Mary Wollstonecraft declared to be more truly delicate than concealment, to cover the boundless communicativeness of a heart that “panted to expand its sensations”; Godwin's pronouncement that social utility is the only criterion of morals, to justify the demands of her affections for satisfaction; and his insistence on “the irresistible power of circumstances, modifying and controuling our character”, to lighten her sense of responsibility. She also acknowledged with her whole heart the duty of self-examination, which can be a strict discipline but is easily deflected into an indulgence by the self-absorbed. It is to her credit as a striving human soul, “a human being loving virtue” as she pathetically insists, that she is able at times to apply these precepts, however maladroitly, to their proper end; the mists of delusion dissolve, her dreams collapse, she is self-convicted of some part of her inordinate egoism, and in floods of tears—those sudden inconvenient outbursts of weeping that are so uncomfortably lifelike in Emma Courtney—but with considerable courage, she retrieves her integrity and sets to work to build up her life again. Miss Hamilton was right and amusing when she set forth—she hardly needed to parody—her Bridgetina's convenient invocations of the principle of social utility. It is a phrase continually on Emma's lips. It enhances her dissatisfaction, her rebellious sense that the vigour of life in her is running to waste, her melancholy craving to “feel the value of existence” once more, by presenting to her the notion that not only she herself but society loses by her frustration. Utility is brandished as a threat in the anguished pedantry of her letters to Harley. “I have said, on this subject, you have a right to be free,” she begins, with more superfluous points than usual; “but I am, now, doubtful of this right: the health of my mind being involved in the question, has rendered it a question of utility—and on what other basis can morals rest?” But there are times when the principle is applied without sophistication, as it is near the end of the book, where Emma clings to her denuded life in order that she may be of service to Harley's son, and writes with some fineness: “It is not to atone for past error, by cutting off the prospect of future usefulness.”

The character of Emma Courtney, then, which is also the character of Mary Hays, provides in its not ignoble pretensions and its self-deluding folly the right material for comedy; and, though it is a comedy with an infusion of the grotesque—it raises loud laughter as well as soft smiling—Miss Hamilton's farcical Bridgetina, relieved against a monitory background of calamities, by no means represents it. Miss Hays did not, naturally, regard herself in a comic light; indeed, early in her life she avowed that she had “no great relish for what is termed humour”. It was not by humour that she was saved from regarding her destiny as purely tragic but, once more, by philosophy. What she had to recount was a history of error and its consequences; and, since error could ex hypothesi be eradicated, not only would there come a time when no such history could take place, but her own individual fate was in some measure retrievable. “Let us reap from the past all the good we can,” she writes in her last letter to Harley, “a close and searching knowledge of the secret springs and foldings of our own hearts.” The science of morals, she believed, was not incapable of demonstration, but it required patient and laborious experiment. As such a laborious and fruitful experiment she considered her own struggles.

Miss Hays's career as a novelist may be dispatched before we pursue the career of her affections. She made one more effort, The Victim of Prejudice, published in 1799. In this book she aimed at a purely fictitious embodiment of the thoughts that exercised her, and the result is a crowded, melodramatic, extravagant story in which the injustice of society in punishing an involuntary lapse from chastity in the heroine is exemplified by the quite exceptional villainy of a lascivious baronet. Mary, beautiful, candid, courageous, a student of mathematics and astronomy, is a more enlightened and worse-fated Emma. Like Emma she argues her way through the book in pedantic, impassioned tirades; like Emma she is violently upset by her emotions and suffers cold shudders and burning heats. Nevertheless she is represented as a completed character, resolute and schooled in self-control. She is destroyed by the social conventions which her reason has rejected, because, as the authoress sadly remarks, while the conduct of the world is in opposition to the principles of philosophers, education will be a vain attempt. There must, in fact, be martyrs. There were moments when Miss Hays regarded herself as a martyr; but neither she nor Emma—if one can distinguish between them—were blameless in their defiance of society; their histories were avowedly examples of intellectual error. In Mary Miss Hays conceived the preparation and martyrdom of a spotless victim. It will be noted that she is never content to write of the ordinary. Beauty, malice, stupidity, wisdom and passion are always in extremes with her, and this takes all validity from her parable of the world as it is. After this book her essential literary barrenness overcame her. A letter from Southey of May 1803 shows that she had asked him to suggest subjects for a novel. He directs her attention to the use she could make of travel books for the background of an exotic story and to the studies in unusual temperaments that remain to be made; but nothing came of his advice. Her creative impulse, slight as it was, began and ended in autobiography. She sketched the face in her mirror and then, redoubling the beautifying touches of the first draft, made it the basis of an ideal portrait. After that she devoted her clumsy pen to industrious compilations, edification and a livelihood.

It is possible to find a number of reasons why she did not make her relations with Charles Lloyd the basis of a novel, of which the most obvious are the sameness of the material to that of Emma Courtney, a dawning sense of ridicule and the experience of savage criticism. Her abstention leaves us dependent upon the comments of the friends of both parties, but since these included Coleridge, Southey, Manning and Lamb, we may well feel more confidence in the chorus than we should have done in the monologue. The chorus is not heard, however, until the catastrophe; it does not accompany the earlier parts of the action. It was an explosion of irritation on the part of Lloyd early in 1800 that set the discussion going between his friends; but he had already been for some years the target of Mary Hays's regard. Traces of their acquaintance are plain to be seen in his novel, Edmund Oliver, which came out in the summer of 1798, and it may be that it is he to whom a note of Godwin's of December 1797 refers, a man whose confidence Mary Hays enjoys and by whom Godwin is instinctively repelled. As we follow these clues backwards we come very near the termination of her hopes in Frend, and perceive, as we might have expected, that her affections could not remain unfocused long.

Charles Lloyd, the son of a Quaker family of bankers in Birmingham, was fifteen years younger than Mary Hays. At twenty-two he was a delicate, nervous, self-conscious young man, and when he came to London in the late autumn of 1797 he had already several major crises behind him, and was deeply shaken in health and spirits by them. He had exchanged banking in Birmingham for the practice of poetry and philosophy with Coleridge at Nether Stowey. He had forsaken the faith of his fathers and been retrieved by Coleridge from scepticism to Christianity. In London he shared rooms with Lamb's cheerful friend, Jem White, and wrote Edmund Oliver, in which by an impertinent use of Coleridge's personality and life in the name-part he testified to the waning of the friendship between them. The book also testifies by the allusions to Mary Hays in the character of the anti-heroine, Lady Gertrude Sinclair, to the interest she felt in the romantic, suffering but rather unreliable young man.

Miss Hays's share in Lady Gertrude has not, I think, been hitherto noticed, and contemporary reviewers, who pounced upon the identity of her other simulacrum, Miss Bridgetina Botherim, omitted to mention this one. The allusions seem to me deliberate and unmistakable, but they do not contribute the whole outline of the figure, for Lady Gertrude, like Bridgetina, has to represent a more completely subversive mode of thought than Miss Hays ever acknowledged. She has to be an atheist, as Bridgetina was but Mary Hays never became. She has to be extremely beautiful, to add the seductions of passionate feminine charm to those of false philosophy. Moreover, since the purpose of the book is to express abhorrence at the dangerous “generalizing spirit” of Godwinite philosophy, the overleaping of specific individual duties in the name of general liberty or benevolence, she has to be brought through betrayal, despair and delirium to suicide, for which if we seek a prototype we must look beyond Mary Hays to hostile conceptions of the career of Mary Wollstonecraft. Nevertheless, in spite of these differences, Lady Gertrude's love-letter to Edward D'Oyley is in many ways so clear a pointer to the author of Emma Courtney that there must have been malice in the intention. Edward D'Oyley, in spite of his Quaker parents and the blurred echo in his surname, does not stand for Charles Lloyd in character, though as recipient of Lady Gertrude's letter he seems to stand temporarily in his shoes. He is the villain of the piece, the corrupter and destroyer of Lady Gertrude, the figment of a shocked but not a strong imagination. Lloyd's own appearance is in the shape of Charles Maurice, the staid, benign, home-and-country-loving mentor of the unstable hero—a tell-tale reversal of the original relations between himself and Coleridge.

The love-letter, in which Lady Gertrude adjures D'Oyley to spurn his Quaker parents' grovelling minds and tell them he is resolved on a connection with her, contains two acknowledged quotations from Emma Courtney and several parallels to the sentiments and arguments of that book. It is a letter in which the woman takes the initiative, claiming a return of affection on the strength of the sympathy of minds; it is vehement in tone, propping emotional appeals upon Godwinite assumptions. “Promises, what are they?” asks Lady Gertrude. “Snares! fetters for the mind! … We should be decided only by the principles of the present hour.” By rejecting such bonds the mind will acquire “an incredible elasticity, fitting it to the occasion”. All prejudices must be destroyed and the search for truth must proceed by means of the boldest speculations and even by the collision of opposing principles, since “he who would walk erect in the difficult path of life, must often have fearlessly plunged amid the intellectual chaos; from thence he will derive stores hitherto undiscovered, and by repeating his efforts will bring new combinations from the unassimilated and unarranged elements of moral science”. This is so close to Emma Courtney's letters to her adopted son, where she bids him “think freely, investigate every opinion, disdain the rust of antiquity, raise systems, invent hypotheses, and, by the absurdities they involve, seize on the clues of truth” that it can hardly be called a parody. At one point Lloyd deserts Emma Courtney to touch distinctly on the life of her creator. Lady Gertrude, like Mary Hays, deems it her duty to be perfectly sincere, and, while proposing a liaison with D'Oyley, is constrained to tell him that she “was once beloved by a youth of most interesting manners, and returned his love”. This oddly pathetic and characteristically misplaced summoning of the shade of John Eccles must, one supposes, have occurred in some letter to Lloyd himself; it fits easily enough into Lady Gertrude's career, but not at all into her character; its curious air of awkward elderly maidenliness recalls Crabb Robinson's insistence that, whatever Mary Hays's principles may have been, her conduct was perfectly correct, and makes Lloyd's easy indiscretions difficult to excuse.

Outside this letter there are no demonstrable allusions, and the story soon diverges from any relation to that of Miss Hays. But the whole picture of Lady Gertrude before she is plunged into tragedy looks like the revenge of a quiet man who has been made uncomfortable, and the cause of the discomfort is spitefully underlined at the end of the book, where Edith Alwynne, the girl who is to draw Edmund Oliver out of the chaos of his sentiments and opinions into the happy discipline of domestic life, refuses to have her love for him brought, however indirectly, to his notice, since she doubts in any case of the “propriety of a female being the first agent in these affairs”. The italics are Lloyd's; and one feels that as he wrote his gathering irritation drove him beyond his original plan. He set out to draw in Lady Gertrude, as his first pages inform us, “a woman of warm affections, strong passions, and energetic intellect, yielding herself to these loose and declamatory principles, yet at the same time uncorrupted in her intentions”. Such a woman Mary Hays was; by this time, too, she has recognized, like Katisha, that she was an acquired taste, only to be appreciated by an educated palate; but when she advanced upon Charles Lloyd, prepared to take years to train him to love her, he failed to hear music in the purring of that bewildered tiger, and in feline anger scratched back. The sketch he gives of Lady Gertrude's manner, however, at the beginning of the book, seems uncoloured by spleen and entirely fulfils our expectations of what would be appropriate to Mary Hays. “Gertrude's temper was ardent—her manners earnest and impressive—she never spoke or moved but the soul beamed in her full eye.—She was impatient of control yet enthusiastic in her desires to diffuse happiness; impetuous and quick in her resentments, yet ever soliciting an admission into the stranger's breast.” The last phrase is particularly revealing, and if we correct this romanticized impression by Miss Hamilton's amusing account of Bridgetina at a party, sitting “screwed up for a metaphysical argument”, and seizing the first chance to launch into a premeditated harangue of second-hand materials, we get a possible picture of Mary Hays as she approached forty. Something of both versions is suggested by Southey's casual outline of her in 1797. He has met Mary Hays, he writes, “an agreeable woman and a Godwinite”, who writes in the Monthly Magazine under the signature of M. H., “and sometimes writes nonsense there about Helvetius”. He uses the word “nonsense” twice, but with a not unkindly inflection. Godwin talks “nonsense” about the collision of minds and Mary Hays echoes him, but he liked her well enough to dispute with her upon the moral effects of towns and maintained a friendly correspondence with her.

Whatever “nonsense” Godwin talked about the collision of minds—no doubt as a means of reaching truth—the collision of Mary's and Lloyd's was productive chiefly of perplexity and distaste in the minds of their friends. She wrote to him and, unlike Godwin, he answered, but, again unlike Godwin, with his tongue in his cheek. Coleridge calls it a “ranting, sentimental correspondence”, and adds, on Lamb's authority, that Lloyd “frequently read her letters in company as a subject for laughter, and then sate down and answered them quite à la Rousseau”. This was probably before he went up to Cambridge in Autumn 1798, as Manning, who became his tutor in mathematics and his friend, declares that he did not babble out her follies; but one may assume that her letters pursued him thither, and that in some fashion he continued to answer them. He had not the gentleness of Frend to a woman who was a pest; moreover, his irritation must have increased when he himself fell in love. There are contradictory statements as to the date of his marriage to Sophia Pemberton; Samuel Lloyd, in his book The Lloyds of Birmingham, gives it as 12 February 1799, but Lamb, writing in September to Lloyd's brother, Robert, speaks as if it were still in the future, and Mr E. V. Lucas would place it soon after the date of his letter. One suspects some connection between this marriage and the angry breach of Lloyd's relations with Mary Hays, and for this the later date would be more suitable as it was during January and February 1800 that their friends were discussing the affair; but Lloyd stayed up at Cambridge for some time after his wedding, and it is possible that it was not made public at once. At all events, whether nettled by some remonstrance of hers—she had once more cause to bewail a lack of “unequivocal sincerity”—or uneasily jesting away some touch of conscience, he first slighted her character in public and then sent her an apology, so odd and slyly barbarous that, if Lamb's version is a fair epitome of it, we must assume it to have been wrung out of Lloyd by some extreme exasperation. He had heard everywhere, he said, that she had been in love with Frend and with Godwin, and that her first novel was a transcript of her letters to Frend. Further, he had said himself that he thought she was in love with him. “In the confounding medley of ordinary conversation, I have interwoven my abhorrence of your principles with a glanced contempt for your personal character.” In this fashion Sophia Pemberton's husband, soon to shake the dust of cities off his feet and retire to a pastoral solitude among the Lakes, made his apology. “My whole moral sense is up in arms against the Letter,” writes Lamb. It was an added touch of ugliness in his sight that Lloyd had given it to his young sister Olivia to copy.

Mary displayed her grief and her correspondence to all her friends, to the disgust of Manning who inclined to be of Lloyd's faction. A loftily disapproving note, embracing both parties to the embroilment, is heard in a letter from Coleridge to Southey. Poor Lloyd, he remarks, is an unstable man. “Every hour new-creates him; he is his own posterity in a perpetually flowing series, and his body unfortunately retaining an external identity, their mutual contradictions and disagreeings are united under one name, and of course are called lies, treachery and rascality.” So much for Lloyd. Of Miss Hays's intellect, he explains carefully, he thinks not contemptuously but certainly despectively, setting it lower than Southey does. “Yet I think you likely in this case to have judged better than I; for to hear a thing, ugly and petticoated, ex-syllogize a God with cold-blooded precision, and attempt to run religion through the body with an icicle, an icicle from a Scotch Hog-trough!—I do not endure it.” The reference, I think, is to her Unitarianism—a position that Coleridge had deserted. The last word on what, so far as we know, was Mary Hays's last disappointment in love comes from a cooler Lamb, who does not go back on his judgment, but does not intend to break with Lloyd because he has faults. It comes in the shape of a proposal to Manning that one day they shall discuss “In what cases and how far sincerity is a virtue?” Not truth, he explains, “who, meaning no offence, is always ready to give an answer when she is asked why she did so and so; but a certain forward-talking half-brother of hers, Sincerity, that amphibious gentleman, who is so ready to perk up his obnoxious sentiments unasked into your notice, as Midas would his ears into your face uncalled for.” On this definition, there does not seem much room for discussion.

During the last years of the century many things must have combined to hurt Mary Hays. The intellectual climate changed with the French war and grew hostile to liberalism and to the hopes and speculations of her friends the philosophers. Mary Wollstonecraft died and Godwin, with a family to keep, drew in his horns and walked warily. The Anti-Jacobin was founded and she fell under its appalling scourge. She had known something of adverse criticisms before, the hectoring jollity of those blows that send the victim reeling. The English Review, which had been polite to the Cursory Remarks, settled the Letters and Essays with the observation: “Female philosophers, while pretending to superior powers, carry with them (such is the goodness of providence) a mental imbecility which damns them to fame.” Emma Courtney received some kind words from the liberal reviews, but it was not long before they were muzzled, and among the authors tainted with revolutionism, whom the clerical reviewers of the Anti-Jacobin haled out for public penance, Mary Hays was not overlooked. She figured with her dear friend, Mary Wollstonecraft, and with Ann Yearsley in the Reverend Richard Polwhele's vicious attack, The Unsex'd Females (1798). In this poem the “Arch-priestess of female Libertinism” calls upon her sex to lay aside their winning weakness, to despise Nature's law and aspire to blend “mental energy with Passion's fire”, and one by one, as they respond, their brows are scored with a savage slash of the pen. Mary Hays gets off as lightly as any one. No doubt the ineptness of the one line which dispatches her—“And flippant Hays assum'd the cynic leer”—in which every important word is wrong, is accounted for by the footnote: “Mary Hays, I believe, is little known”; but this was not comforting. By May 1799 the Anti-Jacobin had looked her up, had found her assertion that “individuality of affection constitutes chastity”, and proceeded to slaughter both her novels in a grand retrospective review, culminating in the growl: “To your distaff, Mary.” “As to the style of her writings,” concluded the reviewer on a milder note, “it is needless to remark; who stays to admire the workmanship of a dagger wrenched from the hand of an assassin?” This was good measure, but they had not yet done with her; her private life, which indeed she had not kept private enough, remained to be exploited. Three months later they saw their chance. A harmless-looking book, John Walker's Elements of Geography, and of Natural and Civil History, already four years old, turned out to have been dedicated to the fair sex, whose well-wisher, the author, had rather foolishly and quite irrelevantly taken up the right of a woman to make a proposal to a man. The reviewer came down on Walker like a load of bricks. Let him ask Mary Hays. She would tell him that the “privilege of addressing” led a woman nowhere but to the loss of the “fascinating charms of female reservedness”. And so forth, without any decency.

On top of these assaults came Miss Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). This is an amusing and sensible book, and not unkindly. Miss Hamilton can see much to praise in Mary Wollstonecraft and in Godwin, but she mistrusts the effect of their theories on uncontrolled and undiscriminating minds, and in Mary Hays she has an example ready to her hand. To be sure, she denies that her characters are drawn from life, but this is no more than the satirist's safe-guarding of his right to exaggerate, caricature and sharpen the follies of the type by the addition of the eccentricities of an individual. Reviewers, at least, had no difficulty in recognizing Mary Hays in Miss Bridgetina Botherim; all the marks were there—the short, unlovely figure, the phonographic reproduction of Godwin's philosophy, the pedantically amorous pursuit of a reluctant man. It was certainly Miss Hays, but a Miss Hays stripped of even such dignity as the Anti-Jacobin had left her, no more a dagger-bearing assassin, but the ridiculous aberration of a small provincial society, the comrade and dupe of shoddy “philosophic” tradesmen and rascally adventurers, as negligible as a spluttering squib against the massive good sense of the English people. The incidents that Miss Hamilton contrives, to make nonsense of her theories and sensibilities, are woundingly funny, and as Miss Hays had no capacity for fun (“I do not care for wit and humour”, remarks Bridgetina, well in character) there can have been nothing to soften the impact of Miss Botherim on her mind. Apart from gratuitous humiliations, when Miss Hamilton in sheer high spirits rolls the blue and yellow finery, the stiff turban with its ribbon and the frizzled wig in the mud, she had to endure the comic perversion of her watchwords and the burlesque of her sentiment. Bridgetina quotes screeds from Political Justice in a small shrill voice and congratulates a friend, who has broken his arm, on the glorious opportunity he now enjoys of proving the omnipotence of mind over matter; she steeps herself in Rousseau, abandons her imagination to “the solemn sorrows of suffocating sensibility” and calls it renovating her energies. Feeling in herself “the capacity for increasing the happiness of an individual”, she searches anxiously for a suitable recipient of her devotion, fixes on the local dentist, with unfortunate results, and replaces him by the young doctor, Henry Sydney, whom she addresses in inflexible love-letters that are terribly close to the original. The degree of parody is often slight; Miss Hamilton's cool hand has only to arrange side by side expressions that in Emma Courtney are separated, to bring out with comic force the interested and specious arguments of that heroine.

“How shall I describe my sufferings?” says Bridgetina, analysing her “importunate sensibility” to an unwilling confidante. “How shall I recount the salt, the bitter tears I shed? I yearn to be useful (cried I) but the inexpressible yearning of a soul which pants for general utility is, by the odious institutions of a distempered civilization, rendered abortive. O divine Philosophy! by thy light I am taught to perceive that happiness is the only true end of existence. To be happy it is necessary for me to love! Universal benevolence is an empty sound. It is individuality that sanctifies affection. But chained by the cruel fetters which unjust and detested custom has forged for my miserable and much-injured sex, I am not at liberty to go about in search of the individual whose mind would sweetly mingle with mine. Barbarous fetters! cruel chains! odious state of society! Oh, that the age of reason were but come, when no soft-souled maiden shall sigh in vain.”

This is fair play enough for a satirist, though painful for the victim. Miss Hamilton, enjoying laughter, was not angry with its victim; she confined her sense of the dangers of liberal and especially non-Christian thought to another part of the book, and used Bridgetina for her sport. There is no venom in her, but her ringing cuffs must have made Miss Hays's head ache. They come most thick and fast in Bridgetina's ratiocinations over Henry Sydney's affections.

“Why should he not love me?” she demands. “What reason can he give? Do you think I have not investigated the subject? Do you think I have not examined every reason, moral and physical, that he could have against returning my passion? Do not think I have learned to philosophize for nothing.”

Not for nothing, certainly, since she can put down the superior attractiveness of Julia's youthful beauty to the “unjust prejudices of an unnatural state of civilization”, and see in her own surrender to her emotions “a link in the glorious chain of causation, generated in eternity”. In her last letter to Sydney Miss Hamilton allows herself to enhance the colouring, while sticking close to the line of argument in Emma Courtney.

“You do not at present see my preferableness,” admits Bridgetina, “but you may not always be blind to a truth so obvious. How can I believe it compatible with the nature of mind, that so many strong reiterated efforts should be productive of no effect? Know, therefore, Doctor Sydney, it is my fixed purpose to persevere. I shall talk, I shall write, I shall argue, I shall pursue you; and if I have the glory of becoming a moral martyr, I shall rejoice that it is in the cause of general utility.”

As a final insult, Miss Hamilton closed her spirited performance by convincing her Bridgetina of error; there is no martyrdom, but a recantation.

It is with pleasure that we contemplate the appeasing process of the years. Mary Hays had little innate faculty for peacefulness, but as time passed and wounds healed into scars, that ached only when the weather was bad, she did manage to settle down. She clung to her feminism. “I have at heart the happiness of my sex, and their advancement in the scale of national and social existence,” she declares in the preface to Female Biography (1803), and advises her young readers to “substitute, as they fade, for the evanescent graces of youth, the more durable attractions of a cultivated mind”. But she is careful to describe herself as “unconnected with any party and disdaining every species of bigotry”, and she does not include Mary Wollstonecraft in her compilation. Matilda Betham, another of Lamb's acquaintances, whose Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women appeared the year after, does include her; but Miss Betham, a miniature painter, could perhaps better afford whatever risk attached to the mention of that courageous and reprobated woman than could Miss Hays, who was writing primarily for young people, and now or a little later tried her hand at teaching for a living. Still, it is an unexpected timidity, the shrinking, perhaps, of a battered fighter from another bruise.

There are very few facts to give substance to the last forty years of her long life. Miss Wedd tells us that there was at one time a suggestion, which never matured, that she should join the Southey household at Keswick; that she lived for some time with a married brother at Wandsworth and helped with his children—a solid family backing was to be presumed behind her experiment in solitary housekeeping—and that she taught for a year in a school at Oundle. The letters of Eliza Fenwick show that by about 1811 or 1812 she was living with her mother again, so the wanderings may have been due rather to restlessness than necessity. She knew narrow means, but had not to fear distress. She continued to wield her pen. Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of all ages and countries. Alphabetically arranged, came out in 1803; it consists of six volumes of tabloid lives. At this time she was meditating a history of manners in England from the accession of the Stuarts, a grandiose project from which Southey gently dissuaded her. Instead, she turned her attention to the youthful mind and produced in Harry Clinton; a Tale of Youth (1804) a reworking of Brooke's Fool of Quality. I have not seen this book, nor the three volumes of Historical Dialogues for Young Persons which followed in 1808. They seem to have been the fruit of her experience as schoolmistress and aunt. From 1814 to 1824 she lived at Hot Wells, Clifton, boarding with a Mrs Pennington, who was acquainted with Mrs Siddons, Mrs Piozzi and Hannah More (a William Pennington, Esq., was inducted as Master of the Ceremonies at Hot Wells in 1785 and this may well have been his widow), and here the fringe of Hannah More's mantle seems to have touched her, for she became interested in one of the many benevolent enterprises of Bristol, the Prudent Man's Friend Society, and wrote two short tracts, The Brothers; or Consequences. A Story of what happens every day (1815), and Family Annals; or the Sisters (1817), to recommend it to “that most useful Part of the Community, the Labouring Poor”. The Society existed “for the purpose of promoting provident habits and a spirit of independence among the poor”; it acted as a bank for their savings and made small loans to deserving cases without charging interest. The tracts were written in simple language and in the form of dialogues, with the scenes laid in humble life. The Gentleman's Magazine approved them as well-timed and sensible publications and wished that they could be introduced into the family of every labourer in the Kingdom. It is not given to many writers to be attacked by the Anti-Jacobin as a subversive and dangerous force and to be praised by the Gentleman's Magazine as a wholesome influence, to pass from discipleship to Mary Wollstonecraft to harmony with Hannah More. However, the old leaven worked in her still. Once more in her Memoirs of Queens Illustrious and Celebrated (1821) she lifts her voice on behalf of the moral rights and intellectual advancement of woman, and expresses her concern that the general training of her sex is rather for “the delights of the harem” than to render them the companions and counsellors of men. What, one wonders, did Miss Hays know of the delights of the harem?

This was her last book. She was then about sixty years old and speaks of herself as “declining in physical strength and mental activity”, though actually she lived till 1843. Hot Wells was not her final resting-place, as it was Mrs Piozzi's and Miss More's; she came back to the Kentish edge of London, living first at Maze Hill and afterwards at Camberwell, near her girlhood's home; and since her papers were preserved with care in a sister's family, we may assume that there was domestic kindness round her in her old age.

These are scanty facts to spread over half a lifetime, not uncharacteristic but not very informative. But there is something to add that shows Mary Hays in a new and pleasing character, as a steady, wise and generous friend. These are the letters of Eliza Fenwick, written to her between 1798 and 1828, and printed by Miss Wedd in her Fate of the Fenwicks. It is probable that her confused and ill-disciplined but by no means poorly endowed nature had always displayed this capacity, and that her relations with her own sex had formed a background of sobriety to her extravagant designs on the other. She met Mrs Fenwick in Mary Wollstonecraft's circle, and the two women sat together by her childbed and deathbed and remained fast friends. Mrs Fenwick, burdened with children and impeded by a shiftless husband, writes from various places in England and Ireland, and, at widening intervals, from Barbadoes and the United States. She makes Mary Hays the confidant of all her enterprises, her literary undertakings, her positions as governess, the education of her son, the launching of her daughter as an actress, the establishment of her schools in Barbadoes and on the mainland and of the lodging-house in New York. For most of her English schemes Miss Hays helped to find the money. Travelling expenses, books, and the younger Eliza's stage dresses came somehow out of her narrow income. There was always a margin for “active kindness” and a “generous loan”. In 1811 Mary and Mrs Hays are taking care of the boy Lanno (Orlando) while his mother and sister are in Ireland. He was a prepossessing child, according to Mrs Fenwick, “in whom a sort of Gentlemanly temper was visible from infancy; so that it was said of him at four years old that he was born to be a plenipotentiary.” Lanno—who never became a plenipotentiary, but died of fever in Barbadoes in 1816—was then in his early teens, and Mary is asked to fortify him with undeviating integrity. “Do not say that you regret that he is not your son,” writes the grateful mother, “for he is yours. You are performing all the most useful, the highest, the moral duties of a mother.” It was wise comfort, and doubtless the activity had been more comforting still; but one divines the tone of the letter that drew such an answer from busy and preoccupied Mrs Fenwick. She comments once, with an air of wonder, on the differences in their natures and fates. Eliza Fenwick, after a full and painful life, felt herself “stealing towards the grave [it was still far off and across the Atlantic] without any of those blank, lonely desolate feelings that you, dear Mary, gifted with extraordinary resources, and connected with a numerous and in a great degree kind and amiable family, too often participate”. She notes with straightforward sympathy the “faithful pourtrayings of unmerited wrongs and consequent sufferings” which her friend's letters often contain. Mrs Fenwick, teaching, dressmaking, accommodating herself to incessantly changing and arduous conditions, wondered, pitied and admired; asked help and returned thanks with a simple frankness that speaks well of both parties in the process; poured forth her grief at the loss of her son, revealed at long last the unhappiness of her daughter's marriage, and in old age sent rare but warm letters of news and enquiry, breathing a hardy and not uncheerful acceptance of toil and sorrow, across a severing ocean to her “dear, prudent, considerate Friend”.

To give this help and receive this acknowledgment is perhaps a small but an unassailable achievement. It is not the work of Bridgetina Botherim, nor do we find, at least in Mrs Fenwick's letters, any reference to social utility. On this ground Mary Hays was a success, and needed no philosophical terminology to make her defeat palatable; she was an effective benefactor, giving with stable benevolence to one who needed and therefore took without embarrassment. She was summoned and replied. The voice was not the voice she had hoped to hear, but it certainly enabled her to contribute to, though never to perfect, the happiness of an individual. There was no apathy in her and no silence round her; and though melancholy and restlessness may at intervals have clouded her mind, she can hardly have become sour.

Note

1. The Love-Letters of Mary Hays and The Fate of the Fenwicks (Methuen). For permission to quote from these books I am indebted to the author and the publishers.