Mary Hays (1759-1843)

The Growth of a Woman's Mind

Gina Luria Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351125857
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Mary Hays, reformist, novelist, and innovative thinker, has been waiting two hundred years to be judged in a fair, scholarly, and comprehensive way. During her lifetime and long after, her role in the ongoing reformist debates in England at the end of the eighteenth century, intensified by the French Revolution, served as a lightening rod for opponents who attacked her controversial stance on women's intellectual competence and human rights. The author's intellectual history of Hays finally makes the case for her importance as an innovator. She was a feminist thinker who advanced notions of tolerance that included women, an educator who broke new ground for female autodidacts, a philosophical commentator who translated Enlightenment ideas for a burgeoning female audience, a Dissenting historiographer who reinvented 'female biography,' and a writer of deliberately experimental fiction, including the roman à clef Memoirs of Emma Courtney. The author approaches Hays from several disciplinary perspectives-historical, biographical, literary, critical, theological, and political-to elucidate the multiple ways in which Hays contributed and responded to, and influenced and was influenced by, the most significant issues and figures of her time.

Part One
Preludes

Chapter One
Love Letters

“I fear I have too often swerved from the rules which [prudence] dictates … Why should we sacrifice sincerity to politeness?”

Mary Hays to John Eccles, Love Letters, 1779

Mary Hays was the most purposefully intellectual woman within the tiny community of English Jacobins in the 1790s. From her girlhood, texts for enlightenment and self-expression were integral to the major interests and events of her long life. The evidence reveals her vigorous participation in the creation, response to, acquisition, archiving, and publication of the written word. She lived much of her life through letters and books. She was happiest learning, more comfortable with other people as correspondents than in person, and responded to others’ texts as if these embodied the writer. The erotic corollary of this was that she spoke more frankly of love and sex in her letters than face-to-face with the objects of her desire. The passions of her life were self-exploration, the pursuit of knowledge, and recognition for her intellectual talents. Hays’s aspirations to learn formed the basis of the creed she constructed for herself out of the various cultural influences to which she had access. Hays valued Rational Dissent’s insistence on the “right to private judgment.”¹ She embraced optimistic Enlightenment claims about the sensory basis of human thought that argued for the greater importance of environmental influences over inborn qualities.

The love letters Hays exchanged between 1779–80 with John Eccles, a young Baptist, express her early and abiding frustration at the gulf between male and female education, among even so enlightened a group as the Rational Dissenters. Hays’s ruminations in the love letters on the propriety of her amorous experiments with Eccles reveal her interest in the possibilities of female freedom, both its perils and its fulfillment. She embraced the cult of Sincerity as a cornerstone of her emotional and intellectual life.² In her love letters Hays was eager to chart a fluid, idiosyncratic, and independent self that presages “feminine Romanticism,” Anne Mellor’s term for female self-writing of the period that is startling and predictive.³

At the time of her exchanges with Eccles, Hays lived at Gainsford Street in Southwark, close by the London wharves, with her widowed mother, younger sister Elizabeth, and several other married and unmarried siblings.⁴ Steeped in the rich aural and print culture of English Dissent, Hays’s girlhood education consisted of informal but avid reading, particularly of poetry and novels; weekly attendance at nonconformist chapels; and familiarity with the musical propaganda and confessions of the spiritual descendants of Bunyan and Milton.⁵ During her adolescence, Hays was eager to devise an analogue for herself to the classical paradigm of education reserved for men. She would, in time, look to a succession of “generous men”—John Eccles, Robert Robinson, Joseph Priestley, John Disney, Hugh Worthington, George Dyer, William Frend, and William Godwin—who nourished her intellectual hunger and provided access to the public life of the mind. Her first epistolary relationship was with Eccles. Their extant correspondence reveals the tentative expression of many of her persistent concerns, as well as her discovery of textual interplay as a vehicle for instruction, intimacy, and inquiry.

These earliest surviving manuscripts reveal that Hays was ambitious to learn and curious about the mental processes of learning. From the correspondence, weknow that what Eccles admired as Hays’s “polished education” consisted of extensive reading of poetry and novels. She had the key to her friend Mrs. Collier’s library, where she explored works by the same authors her later fictional heroines read. Even in the midst of her ardent—and illicit—romance with Eccles, she criticized the chasm between men’s freedom to learn and the constraints on women’s education, noting the “stillness and privacy” of female life.⁶ She envied Eccles’s classical training, and proposed that he be her tutor instead of her lover. With the precedent of Rousseau’s Heloise before her, she sensed the combustible sexual potential when woman and man came together in pursuit of knowledge. She urged him to teach her what he knew as a man without hurting her as a woman.⁷

Hays first looked to literature for instruction. We can conjecture that she organized “Love Letters,” the collection of her correspondence with Eccles, as a novel modeled after Richardson, a writer who influenced her strongly.⁸ As narrator, Hays strives to take some distance from her youthful literary persona Mary Hays—or “Maria” or “Polly” as Eccles variously dubs her—to recreate the story of their “grand affair.” This self-consciousness is a continuation of the awareness she and Eccles expressed that they were creating a record of their own (sometimes) “innocent intercourse” while they passed back and forth the volumes of a popular epistolary romance, Fatal Friendship, By a Lady (1770). Perhaps the most important model for crafting a collection of love letters in which the lovers were rational, high-minded, virtuous, and ardent is the correspondence of Heloise and Abelard, familiar to Hays at least through Alexander Pope’s poem “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717). “M. H.,” as she signs herself, writes in the cover of a letter of Friday, 31 July 1779, to Eccles, “Let me hear from you soon, though I must not see you,” and adds, “Heaven first taught letters to some wretched maid,/Some banished lover, or some captive’s aid,” lines 51 and 52 of “Eloisa to Abelard.”⁹ Hays quotes from memory; the original verse reads, “Heaven first taught letters for some wretch’s aid,/ Some banished lover, or some captive maid.” Her transposition of the order of marginal subjects to whom “Heaven” first provides written language reveals the intensity of her understanding, as well her feelings, about the power of writing and the limitations of female autonomy. Hays’s intimate knowledge of the poem, and, therefore, of at least the rudiments of the personal and textual history of the real Heloise and Abelard, suggests an independent source for her observations on the differences between women and men that follow. It also explains in part the zeal with which she took to the clandestine zone that she and Eccles inhabit in their correspondence.

In the love letters Hays meditates on Eloisa’s celebration of women’s right to love passionately outside the bounds of marriage. Eloisa also serves as an emollient, softening Hays’s guilt over her own sexual curiosity and trespasses. If Eloisa’s sins could be forgiven because she loved much, surely a (still) virgin daughter could be excused for disobeying her mother. But even as Hays vacillates about the propriety of her erotic explorations with Eccles, in the imaginary sphere of her correspondence she sounds the female voice clear, distinct, and subversive, much as Pope’s Eloisa and the historical Heloise do in their epistolary interchanges with men. In her letters Hays also seeks constant reassurance from Eccles that he will be faithful to her because her sensual response to him is complicated by her own vulnerability and subverted by what she has been taught to fear about men’s mistreatment of women. The evidence suggests that Eccles himself is reliable. But to Hays, they are gendered figures in a static tableau in which men press for illicit sex, and women must hold out for marriage. She voices her emerging consciousness of the different realms in which the two sexes exist, a complex response composed of envy, resentment, admiration, longing, and skepticism. Again and again in the letters, she questions Eccles’s ability to be faithful, to withstand the blandishments of the “world and its amusements” because he is a man.

The Setting

The earliest surviving self-conscious text by Hays is a volume in her handwriting of the letters Hays at 19, exchanged with Eccles, then 23. It tells the story of their covert relationship, begun when their respective parents rejected their proposal to marry. It continued with frequent and ardent exchanges until Eccles’s sudden death from a fever 18 months later, just as the parents relented and marriage seemed a probability. With her love life abruptly halted, Hays turned to imaginative experiments in the layering of texts and the positioning of real voices in the manuscript “Love Letters,” extracting text from life and inserting it back again. Hays’s text begins on 12 February 1779, and ends on 23 August 1781, with her “Concluding Note” in observance of “that fatal day, which blasted all the fond hopes of my youth.” Hays copied the letters in the year following Eccles’ death to form what she called her “book,” the first documented instance in which grief galvanized her to create an artifact of her experience.¹⁰

As Hays transformed them, the letters demonstrate that in the midst of a passionate relationship, Hays used the correspondence to reflect on the differences between women and men. Within the insular nest of family and local Rational Dissenters, she discovered that writing offered freedoms that even romantic love could not provide. Through her girlhood, listening to sermons that extolled God’s command “to add knowledge to all other Christian virtues,”¹¹ Hays came to see the search for enlightenment as a legitimate exercise in the ongoing progress of the Christian pilgrim. As she heard learned men analyze controversial political and ethical issues, she observed the forms of discourse. From within the quotidian female culture in which she was inculcated, Hays gestated a stubborn independence, applying Rational Dissenting pragmatism to the seemingly intractable, though usually ignored, problems of woman’s competence and women’s place. On her own, Hays discerned that female sexuality was an authentic, if dangerous, form of knowledge. Her protestations to Eccles about the “propriety” of their erotic experiments were not just maidenly coyness, as Hays explains in her introduction to the love letters. Rather, she expressed genuine ambivalence about the historical imperative that women preserve their chastity whatever the cost, while men were free to adventure sexually, as well as intellectually. Hays intimates that sexuality may be a vehicle for autonomy, either as personal fulfillment or submission.

The Story

Hays’s “Love Letters” book begins with her entrance into the world of romantic travail. Mrs. Hays has asked to meet with Eccles to tell him that he may no longer see Hays. In her preface, Hays writes that “some malevolent and ill grounded aspersion being related to my family, they determined (if possible) to put an end to our connection … before I acquiesced in their commands, I insisted on having one more interview with the object of my tenderness.” Even before the final meeting, in a spirit of subversion, Eccles and Hays conspire about the future. “I am now going to commit a trespass on the respect I owe Mrs. Hays, and on your delicacy,” Eccles writes,

but I cannot help it. I expect to be forbid ever to speak to you again; if so I hope you will not refuse to see me once afterwards in private; this favor I think I may claim, for oh! Miss Hays, I have loved you; I adore you; and the greater discouragements I have met with, the more firmly has my heart been attached to you; this deserves some regard.¹²

Perhaps to test the depths of the young people’s affections, perhaps concerned that a youthful flirtation was veering into a serious sexual affair, Hays’s mother had acceded to Eccles’s father’s demand that the couple separate. Since Eccles had rooms in a house just across the street Hays and Eccles had plain view of each other’s bedroom windows the young people found it possible to stay in contact by a set of ingenious signals, and even in Mrs. Hays’s occasional absences, to visit privately behind closed doors. Eccles and Hays wrote to each other at least three times a week while his energies were presumably focused on acquiring the means to support a wife. Hays is the heroine of the “Love Letters” as she configures them, torn between forbidden love and filial duty. In the Hays family’s insular world, Hays seemed a relatively good catch on the marriage market: her father had left her an annuity of £70 per annum, dependent on her mother’s approval of her choice of a husband. By contrast, Eccles was no bargain: he seems to have had neither occupation, nor savings, nor any annuity; and his father had refused to help him gain independence after an unsuccessful foray into the family business. At first Mrs. Hays and others in their circle suspected that Eccles was after Hays’s money. Some went so far as to say that, since Hays was not pretty, an assured income was her only asset. In the course of the lovers’ correspondence, Hays acknowledged the truth of this assessment of her looks. Her memory of their “earliest acquaintance was a consciousness that I possessed but few personal charms … opposition I believe increased my affection, and I determined to persevere.”¹³ Eccles’s father, however, was not impressed with Hays or her bequest. He opined to Eccles th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART ONE Preludes
• PART TWO Promises
• PART THREE The Buried Life
• Bibliography
• Index