[In the following essay, Hoagwood discusses the connections between Hays's polemical writings and her novel The Victim of Prejudice.]

Mary Hays's The Victim of Prejudice (1799) is an important feminist novel, intellectually and aesthetically. Its author was a prominent figure among British writers who, during the period of the French Revolution and afterward, advocated feminist and politically radical forms of thought. A friend of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Joseph Priestley, and many others in the radical circles working in London in the 1790s, Hays wrote polemical literature as well as fiction, contributing to the periodical press and writing novels, biographies, and works of political and philosophical argument. The Victim of Prejudice, her second novel, is the most advanced and intellectually important fiction that she ever wrote. This novel has, unfortunately, long been thought—even by some of the foremost contemporary specialists in women's literature of the eighteenth century—to be nonexistent except in French translation;¹ the present edition is the first publication of the novel since its first edition of nearly two hundred years ago.

Treating directly such social topics as rape, child molestation, madness, imprisonment, economic hardship, prostitution, and suicide, The Victim of Prejudice shares concerns with Mary Hays's other works—including her Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798)—and with works by her friends, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. These concerns include a theory of social determinism and class conflict founded in a critique of “custom” and “prejudice”; in twentieth-century terms such a critique amounts to a theory of ideology. Her novel is a valuable document in the history of English radicalism, no less than the history of the novel and the history of literature by and about women.

As Jane Rendall has usefully observed, feminist argument was in the eighteenth century associated with political polemics and activities in the American and French Revolutions.² Much feminist literature by women tends to explore conjunctions among kinds of social conflict (e.g., economic and sexual), and more broadly Hays treats the relationships between what is apparently personal and what is profoundly political. For example, The Victim of Prejudice shares some concerns with Agnes Maria Bennett's The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors (1797), including the conjunction of narrowly economic facts with emotional and attitudinal structures (“They despise me for my poverty,” says Bennett's eponymous beggar girl). An important principle is the recognition that emotions and attitudes are broadly social in origin and in effect, rather than merely personal or individualistic phenomena. These ideas came to reappear with some frequency in fiction by women: Fanny Burney, for example, a far more conservative thinker and writer than Hays, produces in 1814 (in The Wanderer) a fictional presentation of problems special to women without wealth or family connections. More ideologically akin to Hays, Susanna Pearson had also written of conjunctions of social and political issues, as in her Poems of 1790, where she writes of the African slave trade and the French Revolution.³

Mary Hays was born to a family of dissenters, like so many of the intellectual radicals in England during the period of the French Revolution. In a community whose center was the home and publishing house of Joseph Johnson (No. 72 St. Paul's Churchyard), Hays came to know many of the most influential among these radical thinkers—Joseph Priestley (whose awesome productivity included volumes of radical political philosophy, including a reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France), Theophilus Lindsey (the founder of Unitarianism), William Frend (who was discharged from Cambridge for his dissenting publications on religious and political issues), William Godwin (who had been a dissenting minister for five years and whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1793] was perhaps the most influential work of political philosophy published in England in the revolutionary decade), and Mary Wollstonecraft (who, like Paine and like Priestley, also wrote an important reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and whose subsequent Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one of the earliest and most influential volumes of feminist argument in England).

In fact, Hays read Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman promptly on its first publication in 1792, and there ensued an important intellectual relationship between the two women. Hays sent to Wollstonecraft the manuscript of a collection of her short pieces for Wollstonecraft's responses and advice prior to their publication as a volume. The volume appeared in 1793 as Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous, a book that includes an essay singularly important in the conceptual background of The Victim of Prejudice. In an essay entitled “On the Influence of Authority and Custom on the Female Mind and Manners,” Hays writes, “of all bondage, mental bondage is surely the most fatal,” and a patriarchal “despotism … has hitherto … enslaved the female mind.”⁴

In 1791 Hays met Godwin at a dinner at the house of Joseph Johnson. In 1794 she wrote to Godwin, asking him to lend her a copy of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, of which she had heard but which she had been unable to see.⁵ Her friendship with Godwin deepened intellectually, and he began to encourage her to embody in fiction her social vision, including her feminist perspective. In 1796 Hays arranged a meeting of Wollstonecraft with Godwin and with Thomas Holcroft, another radical thinker and writer in the circle of Joseph Johnson. Wollstonecraft had not seen Godwin since 1791, and Hays's reintroduction of the two writers to each other nurtured an important intellectual flowering. Hays's friendship with both writers flourished: they read each other's works and exchanged advice; Wollstonecraft asked Hays to write reviews of fiction for The Analytical Review, including Hays's 1796 review of The Gossip's Story by Mrs. Jane West; and Hays published two separate tributes to Wollstonecraft after her death in 1797.

In 1796 and 1797 Hays published a series of articles in The Monthly Magazine presenting arguments of a kind that reappear in her later work, including The Victim of Prejudice; these are arguments on feminism and environmentalism, contending that social forces shape and determine human minds and lives. Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), her first novel, presents a critique of social conventions in the fictional context of frustrated love. Here, Hays integrates material from her relationships with Godwin and with Frend—adapting, in fact, some documents from her intellectual correspondence with Godwin. Thus Hays engages her fiction with real-life issues, including social problems involving “prejudices the most venerated.” Frend had, of course, been removed from his office at Cambridge for blasphemy and sedition. As Kenneth L. Moler has said, the novel takes a largely social theme: “in a more enlightened social order, [the heroine of Emma Courtney] would not have been condemned to a life of frustration and disappointment by archaic prejudices and institutions.”⁶ Jane Spencer, author of the only extended discussion of The Victim of Prejudice, has observed that Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice together constitute a feminist analysis of social institutions, though it is the second novel that deals more rigorously with difficult issues including “the whole range of social institutions.”⁷

The passages in Emma Courtney which criticize conventional marriage, institutionalized religion, and the oppression of women are coherently related to works that Hays had been writing and publishing in the polemical press for some years, including Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous; subsequently, in 1798, Hays published anonymously a sustained work of surprisingly comprehensive feminist argument, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. As Gina Luria has noticed, it is significant that this work was reviewed in only two contemporary periodicals.⁸ Counter-revolutionary war abroad was accompanied by repressive developments at home. Already in 1794 Pitt had arranged for the suspension of habeas corpus. In 1797-98, Thomas Paine was tried and convicted of treason (for the publication of Rights of Man); Paine's lawyer, Thomas Erskine, was tried for sedition, having published in 1797 his own View of the Causes and Consequences of the War with France (which nonetheless went through forty-eight editions).⁹ Coleridge, among others, testified at the trial of Frend for sedition; and Wordsworth and Coleridge learned of a spy who had been sent to watch them as they looked, in ways that made the government suspicious, over the English Channel. Joseph Johnson, publisher for Hays, Wollstonecraft, and other radicals, was prosecuted and imprisoned in 1798 for publications that seemed, to frightened governmental authorities, seditious. Under these conditions radical political opinion was driven underground or abroad. A violent riot in Birmingham, which was probably instigated by government agents, chased Priestley first to London and then to America; Paine was already in France when he was convicted of treason in England. For writers who remained in England the discourse of radical opposition was displaced into the safer forms of figurative language, where covert and symbolic presentation of ideological issues became a norm for British Romantic writing.¹⁰

The repressive and even dangerous conditions in England in 1798 drove Hays's feminist argument into anonymity, but that argument was not wholly suppressed: in the Appeal Hays argues forcibly that “the world has ever been, and still is, more guided by custom and prejudice, than by principle” (p. 128), and these customs and prejudices are singularly injurious for women. Custom, prejudice, and opinion are not merely mental things, because they arise in material conditions: “all opinions degrading to women, are grounded on the rude ideas of savage nations, where strength of body is the only distinguishing feature” (p. 131). Further, systems of ideas produce material effects: “the cultivation of the minds and morals of women, is considered as the one thing needful—the first object in their education—the foundation, upon which any solid hopes of future improvement may be placed;—or any thing really beautiful can be raised” (p. 204).

This dialectical linkage of ideological and material formations is, in a general way, common to the circle of radical thinkers to which Hays belonged. Wollstonecraft had argued that the imperfection of all modern governments arises from the fact that their constitutions had been formed in times of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition.¹¹ The most generalized philosophical exposition of that dialectical linkage is by Godwin, who argues that mind and nature and society, or human intellect and the material and social worlds, are connected in reciprocally determining ways, and the results are profoundly political: “the opinions of men [are], for the most part, under the absolute control of political institution,” while reciprocally “the happiness men are able to attain, is proportioned to the justness of the opinions they take as guides in the pursuit.”¹² The development of this mode of thought in connection with gender relations, however, is accomplished rather by Wollstonecraft (in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and by Hays (in the Appeal). The exploration of the theory in artistic forms appears then in Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman (incipiently) and in Hays's The Victim of Prejudice, fully elaborated and finely wrought.

The aesthetic design of The Victim of Prejudice is also striking: the novel embeds hermeneutic models, fictionalizing writing itself and displaying acts and models of interpretation within its plot. Often in the novel important issues are disclosed in letters between characters, and even in letters discovered by third parties; some features of reality and history are available to the characters only in written form, and interpretation always mediates reality in these cases. In one centrally important instance, a letter from Mr. Raymond to the heroine, Mary, reports the contents of another letter, written by her mother in the distant past (Mary had never known her own mother). One of the novel's themes is the continuity of women's experience, and this theme works itself out through the troubled medium of hermeneutic and historical distance.

The reality of Mary's mother as a determining influence in Mary's life, even though Mary did not know her, is a salient issue in the novel's intellectual structure. The analogy between her mother's history and Mary's own amounts to a theme, which the novel socializes: relations of class and gender, and the relatively rigid machinery of social institutions, account for much of the parity between the women's stories. All of the relevant history, however, comes to Mary thrice mediated: the history is interpreted by Mary's mother, who encodes her story in the letter; it is again interpreted by Mr. Raymond, who re-encodes it for Mary a generation later; and it is interpreted by Mary in her narrative, which constitutes the novel.

.....

Epistolary fiction had long been mediating its histories in character's writings, of course. Perhaps the most monumental epistolary achievement of the eighteenth century is Richardson's Clarissa, which, like The Victim of Prejudice, narrates a rape;¹³ in women's fiction the narrative form had also been used fairly extensively, of course—as in Agnes Maria Bennett's Agnes-de-Courci, A Domestic Tale (1789). The Victim of Prejudice makes an intellectual use of this design which is new and important: Hays writes a novel which is not a domestic tale, but rather social criticism of a much larger scale. The author's theories of history, society, and knowledge are repeatedly articulated, in her polemics as well as her fiction; these theories entail a conjunction between material history and intellectual forms, and especially the conjunction between social relations (including the oppression of women) and “education” in the broad, cultural, eighteenth-century sense of mental formation. The novel persistently and effectively engages its social themes with this theory of mental formations. Those social themes include preeminently the oppression of women and the determining power of economic and social-class structures. The theory with which Hays analyzes those issues is—like Godwin's, like Wollstonecraft's—a dialectical one, arguing for the reciprocal determinism of material and intellectual structures at the level of culture and ideology. All of the major events in the heroine's life—including her childhood molestation and finally her impending death—arise as effects of societal structure, and not as unique personal accidents.

The plot of the novel is, in one sense, a progressively deepening understanding that Mary herself gains, an understanding of the large-scale social relationships which have in many ways determined the lives of her mother, herself, and virtually all women in the society she knows. Mary Wollstonecraft's closely related but never completed novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, begins to thematize exactly these issues, simultaneously historical and hermeneutic in its concerns.¹⁴ In contrast, The Victim of Prejudice is a finished work, sophisticated alike in its social theory, its narrative design, its historical hermeneutic, and its pervasive feminism.

After the publication of The Victim of Prejudice in 1799, an increasingly conservative environment in England tended to inhibit recognition and appreciation of Hays's work. The French invasion of the peaceful Swiss in 1798 had inflamed opposition at home to Jacobin arguments. There had been reason to fear a French invasion of Britain since 1796, when peace negotiations had been unsuccessful, and the expansion of war in 1798 created an environment hostile to writers who had been active in the defense of the French Revolution, including writers like Hays, and like Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey, three men who seemed to turn conservative at about this time. Hays, however, continued to write and to publish treatments of women's issues and educational issues, and works of fiction. In 1803 she published Female Biography; or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries; she published tales and also instructive or doctrinal volumes for years, including Family Annals, or The Sisters in which, as late as 1817, Hays returns to the environmentalism of Helvetius, a set of arguments that she had treated in 1796 and 1797 in the Monthly Magazine during her more openly Jacobin period.

The governmental and public pressures that drove so many writers into apparent compliance and conservatism in the early nineteenth century brought two perhaps predictable sets of problems for Hays's reputation. One problem concerns malicious gossip: Hays's vigorously intellectual social criticism was belittled by propagandistic focus on her supposed flirtations. Even in the twentieth century, Emma Courtney has sometimes been trivialized, as if it were primarily about nothing more important than the author's private feelings for a particular man. In 1800 Charles Lloyd tried to start a rumor that Hays had flirted with him; and this humiliating triviality has sometimes seemed to eclipse the important contributions that Hays made in feminism, in social theory, and in fiction.

A second issue has been entirely practical in its consequences: her most important novel and perhaps her best book was for political reasons immediately greeted with hostile reviews. It has remained out of print ever since. The publication of the present volume resolves both sorts of problems: not only is the novel again available, but it is in itself proof against the belittling criticisms of contemporaries. The novel engages itself with social issues so explicitly, profoundly, and totally, and in such a finished novelistic form, that the quality, depth, and range of Hays's thought is apparent again, as it was when—191 years ago—this novel was last available.

Notes

1. Janet M. Todd, “Mary Hays,” in Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, vol. 1: 1770-1830, ed. Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Gossman (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979): “In 1799, Hays published her second novel, The Victim of Prejudice (Paris, 1799), which exists now in only a French edition” (p. 217). Fortunately the novel's first English edition does exist, though only a very few copies have been traced. The present volume is a reproduction of the copy in the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania.

2. Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780-1860 (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), especially pp. 33-72.

3. Valuable sources of information on women writers of the period include A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800, ed. Janet Todd (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985); Moira Ferguson, First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 413; and British Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Continuum [Frederick Ungar], 1989).

4. Mary Hays, Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (London, 1793; rpt. New York: Garland, 1974), pp. 19-20.

5. See Hays's letter to Godwin, in Shelley and His Circle, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:139.

6. Kenneth L. Moler, Jane Austen's Art of Illusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), p. 198.

7. Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 130-131. On The Victim of Prejudice, Spencer points out that “Hays is explicit in tracing the heroine's wrongs to social causes, and makes an open attack on male dominance and the oppressive ideology of natural female chastity” (p. 132).

   For brief mentions of The Victim of Prejudice (which is the only sort of mention ever made of the novel in the twentieth century, apart from Spencer's good discussion), see Moler, Jane Austen's Art of Illusion, p. 200n.; Gina Luria, introduction to Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (New York: Garland, 1974); Moira Ferguson, First Feminists, p. 413; Janet Todd, “Mary Hays,” in A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800, p. 157; Alice Browne, The Eighteenth-Century Feminist Mind (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), p. 169; and (most helpful among these brief accounts) Jane Spencer, “Mary Hays,” in British Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide. Earlier general accounts of Hays include A. F. Wedd, The Love Letters of Mary Hays (London: Methuen, 1925), pp. 1-13; J. M. S. Tompkins, The Polite Marriage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), pp. 150-87; and M. Ray Adams, Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism (1947; rpt. New York: Greenwood, 1968), pp. 83-103. Especially useful in connection with Hays's political (and specifically feminist) arguments is Burton R. Pollin, “Mary Hays on Women's Rights in the Monthly Magazine,” Etudes Anglaises 24, 3 (1971): 271-82.

8. Gina Luria, introduction to Appeal, p. 14.

9. See Bruce Gronbeck, “Thomas Erskine,” in Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, 1:162.

10. I discuss symbolic ideological discourse in the period in my essay, “Fictions and Freedom: Wordsworth and the Ideology of Romanticism,” in Power's Presents: Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey Cox and Larry Reynolds, a collection of essays not yet in print.

11. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (London, 1790; rpt. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1960), p. 19.

12. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, ed. F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 1:26.

13. On the rape in Clarissa and issues in social criticism, see Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), especially pp. 56-69, 72-73, and 82-83: Eagleton effectively argues against “the offensive suggestion that Clarissa desires her own violation,” and observes that “if virtue is necessary it is also an encumbrance, since to behave well in a predatory society is the surest way to unleash its violence.”

14. An excellent account of Wollstonecraft's novel in this connection is Tilottama Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 27 (1988): 221-51.