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Mary Hays, Disciple of William Godwin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

M. Ray Adams
M. Ray Adams*
Affiliation:
Franklin and Marshall College
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Extract

Mary hays was one of that remarkable coterie of women, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Alderson, Mrs. Reveley, Mrs. Fenwick, and Mrs. Inchbald, who afforded William Godwin a sort of philosophic seraglio. Little is known of her life: no biographical sketch of her exists. As the information left by others is sparse, we must depend much upon her supposedly autobiographical novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney. She lived to be eighty-three, but the last forty years of her life are without a record. Soon after the decade of the French Revolution she became enveloped in an obscurity which has never lifted. Once the immediate revolutionary impulse had spent itself, she seems to have written nothing more. But in the revival of the fame of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, to both of whom she was as faithful as their shadows, she perhaps deserves more attention than she has received. In her blind discipleship she innocently reduced many of Godwin's philosophical maxims to absurdities. She thus made herself the laughing-stock of those conservatives whose sympathies were narrowed by mere respectability as well as of certain liberals whose convictions did not give them such reckless courage.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1940 , pp. 472 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1940

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References

1 Memoirs of Emma Courtney, i, 23.

2 Letters and Essays, p. 48.

3 Letter of January 25, 1800, to Southey; See Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by E. H. Coleridge (Boston, 1895), i, 323.

4 Memoirs of Emma Courtney, i, 53.

5 Ford K. Brown, The Life of William Godwin (New York, 1926), p. 109. Of this proposal Godwin discreetly makes no mention.

6 Associate of Coleridge at Cambridge, whence he had been expelled for freethinking in 1793.

7 Mary Wollstonecraft reproved her for her “vain humility” in pleading the disadvantages of her education as an excuse for defects, and for her foolish thirst for that praise usually bestowed as a matter of form by men upon the work of women but denied by them in private. Her critic was simply attempting to stiffen the feminine spine. For Mary Wollstonecraft's letter, see W. Clark Durant's supplement to his edition of Godwin's Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1927).

8 See Godwin's letter to Miss Hays, Ford K. Brown, op. cit., p. 114.

9 Ibid., pp. 118–119.

10 The letter to Mr. Hugh Skeys is very expressive of her attachment to Mary Wollstonecraft. See C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (London, 1876), i, 282.

11 Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (London, 1847), p. 152.

12 Works of Charles Lamb, edited by E. V. Lucas (London, 1912), v, 157.

13 Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge i, 322.

14 Letters and Essays, p. 180.

15 Ibid., pp. 20, 80, 26. These references are grouped in the order of the quotations above

16 See numbers for February, June, and September of 1796 and January of 1797.

17 xxiii, 443.

18 ii, 44–48.—All the quotations in this paragraph are from this letter.

19 i, 4.

20 i, 63.

21 ii, 71. In answer to this, she points out to him an essential paradox of Godwin's philosophy. All her calamities in love, she declares, have flowed “from chastity having been considered a sexual virtue”; and, since, as he has shown, we are the creatures of impression and bound by the inexorable chain of necessity, the philosopher is shrinking from his own principles. Mr. Francis dodges the problem and begins to turn the course of her ideas in order to relieve her emotional tension.

22 P. 85.

23 ii, 116.

24 ii, 18. The emotional dryness of Godwin's philosophy has undoubtedly been overdrawn by his critics. In this connection, see B. Sprague Allen, “William Godwin as a Sentimentalist,” PMLA, xxxiii (1918), 1–29. Mr. Allen concludes: “Whether he would have admitted it is a question, but the fact is that the inmost shrine of his philosophy might be entered by way of either the reason or the feelings. The preference seems to have been for the latter way, if we can judge by the character and writings of his most ardent disciples.” Among these disciples this was particularly true of Mary Hays. Perhaps Mr. Francis is too austere a portrait for the Godwin whom she knew.

25 See op. cit., p. 110. There seems to be nothing as a basis for such identification but the mere report that Miss Hays introduced some of her letters to Godwin into the correspondence between Emma and Harley. Godwin, as Mr. Francis, is given the dignified rô1e of philosophical mentor, a part which we know he played in real life. Emma's love for Mr. Francis is purely platonic. Brown also confuses Augustus Harley with his son.

26 ii, 55.

27 i, 118–124.

28 ii, 31.

29 iii, 58.

30 P. iv.

31 i, 111. It is strange that the life of Mary Wollstonecraft was not included in this work, though Miss Hays had written her obituary for the Monthly Magazine (iv, 232–233).

32 i, 612.

33 i, 55; v, 39–40.

34 i, 40–41.

35 P. xv.

36 ii, 85n.

37 iii, 106.

38 This burlesque of the Pantisocratic scheme is unfair to Godwin and his followers, who did not preach reversion to the state of noble savagery and in whose picture of the perfect society there was nothing of the primitive.

39 iii, 349–350.

40 Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, edited by Thomas Sadler (Boston, 1869), i, 37. See also Henry Crabb Robinson on Boohs and their Writers, edited by Edith J. Morley (London, 1938), i, 130–131, 234–235; iii, 843.

41 In fact, Robinson in a note on her death remarks that she had “stuck fast” in her liberal opinions (Ibid., ii, 629).

Some of the obscurity which has enveloped Miss Hays's youth and later maturity has been dispelled by J. M. S. Tompkins in “Mary Hays, Philosophess,” The Polite Marriage (Cambridge, 1938). She has had access to family letters not available to me and has thus been able to present more fully than here the emotional nexuses that make up so large a part of any biography of Mary Hays. The few facts unearthed about her later life show her feminism unimpaired, though her radicalism otherwise was subdued to an active benevolence among “the labouring poor.”