Mary Hays's 'Female Biography'

Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism

Mary Spongberg, Gina Luria Walker, Mary Spongberg, Gina Luria Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367178697
• eBook ISBN: 9780429603433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

The essays included in Mary Hays's 'Female Biography': Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism emerge from the authors' collaboration in producing the first modern edition of Hays's work in the Chawton House Library Edition (2013, 2014). This book explores Hays's larger ambitions to lay the foundation for an encyclopaedic work by, for, and about women. The scholars' contributions to this volume engage with some of the multiple problems and possibilities that Female Biography presented. Drawing on this effort, individual scholars examine Hays's attempts to correct existing masculinist constructs which framed the 'universe of knowledge' then and persist in our time. Hays perceived that these had the cumulative effect of rendering women invisible. She responded to such absence by providing examples of the extent of female worth across Western society. Other contributions focus specifically on the subjects of Hays's entries, looking at how she used source material and laid the groundwork for future biographical studies of women's lives.

Both Female Biography and Hays herself have continually presented difficulties in categorization: not quite Enlightenment, not quite Victorian either. This book recontextualizes her work, demonstrating the radicalism and originality of her feminism, even in its post-Wollstonecraftian phase, as well as the longevity of her influence. As such, it will be of interest to those conducting research into Hays, her subjects, and the evolution of life-writing by women.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

"I SOUGHT & MADE TO MYSELF AN EXTRAORDINARY DESTINY"

Gina Luria Walker

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the difficulties over more than forty years in recovering an accurate “female biography” of Mary Hays. In doing so, I explore the intellectual and affective relationship between the female biographer and her female subject. Mary Hays was known as a peripheral associate of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin when I began my doctoral research in 1969. Even the discovery of an archive of her correspondence and other papers in private hands in London could not dispel the “buried life” she seemed to live as she grew older. The recent extensive research of Dr. Timothy Whelan into the papers of Henry Crabb Robinson and his circle reveals that Hays was at the center of a Unitarian network of learned women, and that her later life was in fact filled with family and friends who appreciated her generous generativity, especially two generations of nieces. Whelan’s discoveries made it possible to track the intrusions and deletions of a series of earlier editors into Hays’s own accounts, attesting to the complex responses and representations of one female figure by another. I suggest that these twin interrogations make further recovery necessary.

The affective and intellectual relationship between female biographer and female biographical subject remains relatively unexplored.¹ Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a biographer of Anna Freud and Hannah Arendt, in Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women’s Lives, emphasizes how the process of writing another woman’s life intimately intertwines the biographer and her subject; the female biography of one inevitably informs the other, in important ways that are sometimes fruitful, sometimes dangerous, to the veracity of both.2 In this article, I want to engage with the vicissitudes of creating an accurate female biography of Mary Hays (1759– 1843) to consider the enduring presence of misogyny, especially in the academy,that makes it hard to read early feminists on their own termsand as contributors to an emerging, vibrant female intellectual tradition. I also want to examine my own life and the lives of other women who have written on Hays by calibrating how prejudices about learned women have blighted the way in which Hays’s life has been understood, often to contradict or suppress evidence. Even today female scholars may reflexively address earlier women in ways that are fraught with the historical sequelae of sexual difference. Recent commentary on Hays’s bio-texts and biography points to archaic assumptions about the ephemeral nature of women’s experiences, the way in whichfemale reputation is made and unmade, and the belief that women’s lives are all too often mediated by their relationships with men, regardless of the significance of their relationships with women.

Hays, 3 Park Street, Islington, to Henry Crabb Robinson, c/o of Mess Rutt and Andrews, Thames Street, 14 February 1806. MS, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, 1806, no. 37. Crabb Robinson Archive, Dr. Williams’s Library, London; transcription courtesy of Timothy Whelan. Quotations from Crabb Robinson’s Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence are by permission of the Director and Trustees of Dr. Williams’s Library, London, and the Henry Crabb Robinson Project (editors Timothy Whelan and James Vigus), School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London.

My own interest in recovering earlier women began as a student in the required Novel course for English majors at Barnard College in New York City. I read Middlemarch (1871–72), in which I happened on George Eliot’s description of Tertius Lydgate pursuing his scientific “intellectual passion.” I appropriated the phrase for my abiding interest in the documented existence and epistemological authority of women as historical subjects. In the same course I read F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948), then the shaping force in the New Criticism’s approach to the academic study of English Literature.

When I came to Leavis’s pronouncements that “Jane Austen, in fact, is the inaugurator of the great tradition in the English novel,” and “Except for Jane Austen, there was no novelist for [George Eliot] to learn from,” I did not believe him.³ From Barnard I went across the street for graduate work at Columbia University where, when asked, I said that I wanted to study Austen as a highly self-aware woman writer at the end of the Enlightenment. The hoary Graduate Student Advisor declared that there was nothing more to be learned about Jane Austen. Instead, he directed me to the eighteenth-century Proseminar Director who responded to my interest by assigning the voluminous self-writings of James Boswell in his recently discovered journals which were then being published in scrupulous modern editions by Frederick A. Pottle and his colleagues at Yale. The Director instructed that I analyze Boswell’s sense of self through the prism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943), in French, rather than the “over used” Freudian approach.

I dutifully produced a thesis on “Boswell’s Search for the ‘Temple of Constancy’,” an unsuccessful quest on his part and on mine. The Directorpraised mythesisbutsaidthatIwas “tooprettytobotherwithaPh.D.”Hecounseled that I should “go home and get married.” I cried all the way back to Brooklyn on the subway and applied to New York University. When the Graduate Student Advisor at NYU asked what subject I wanted to pursue for my doctoral research, I replied, “A highly self-conscious woman on the margins of the late Enlightenment.” He sent me to see Professor Kenneth Neill Cameron (1908–1994), the Oxford-trained scholar who had resuscitated Percy Shelley asphilosopherandpoetfromhislongstandingreputationasaflighty “adolescent.”Cameron was the founding Director of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library (now the Carl H. and Lily Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, housed in the Research Division of the New York Public Library) and initiated the meticulous scholarship on the Pforzheimer manuscripts that continues today. Cameron agreed that I could study Austen. “But before you get started,” he said, “go to the Pforzheimer Library, tell them that I sent you, and ask to see what they have on Mary Hays.” I did so, and what I found changed my life.

Encountering Mary Hays

The Pforzheimer Library held several letters to and from Hays, as well as the editions by Anne F. Wedd (1875–1958), her great great-niece, of The Love-Letters of Mary Hays (1925) and The Fate of the Fenwicks (1927). The original documents Wedd published seemed to have disappeared. I followed my nose until I located a cache of Hays materials in private hands in London: 115 letters to and from Hays in correspondence with Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, Robert Southey, Eliza Fenwick and others. The Pforzheimer Library sent me to London for five days to meet with the owner of the letters, Miss Jill Organ (d. 1989), who had inherited them at the death of Wedd, an older friend with whom she used to attend public lectures at Dr. Williams’s Library. Miss Organ was a tall, swan-like “maiden lady” – her term – whom I plied with dinner, chocolates and alcohol in the interests of seeing the letters, at first to no avail. Finally, on my last night in London, she agreed to let me have a peek at the documents, provided that I made no notes about them. She led me into her bedroom, pulled out a small, battered leather chest from under her bed and then stopped. “I’m not certain you’re old enough to read these, my dear,” she said anxiously. “I’m a married woman, Miss Organ,” I answered, uncertain of the dilemma. She nodded: “But there are delicate subjects discussed: passion, agnosticism, even – ” and her voice dropped “ – talk of suicide!”

This was my first encounter with a woman’s recoil from the threat of contagion that Hays was believed to represent. I was too naïve to appreciate the magnitude of sexual and heterodox danger Miss Organ imputed toh er, or the implied assumption that I would judge Hays as she did. I managed to convince Miss Organ to let me look at the letters that night. She allowed me to thumb through Hays’s annotated copy of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In the next year the Pforzheimer Library purchased the letters from Miss Organ for my use although, by the time I was back in New York at the Pforzheimer, the director had already been contacted by Sotheby’s in London, which had been retained by Miss Organ to represent her in a bidding war for the Hays papers between the British Museum and the Pforzheimer Library. The Pforzheimer won the six-month battle, and received the archive just before I finished my dissertation “Mary Hays: A Critical Biography.”

I made my way through the materials at the Pforzheimer Library by and about Hays, read their collection of her published works (with the exception of Female Biography which at a cursory glance appeared too long, boring and in the mode of preachy Victoriana to bother with), and studied the existing commentary about them. I was increasingly dismayed by the accumulation of negative, even scathing, contemporaneous accounts of Hays and her publications. The most virulent was Coleridge’s description of Hays as “A Thing, ugly and petticoated.” As I investigated various sources that might explain Hays’s texts, what was known of her experiences and her reception, the most sympathetic and illuminating were those of the Rational Dissenters with whom she corresponded and socialized whose names were unfamiliar, their ideas mostly omitted from discussions of the literary, political and philosophical conflicts during the Revolutionary period. It was obvious that the clamorous voices of conservatives drowned out support for Hays.

Early twentieth-century commentators persisted in such damning reactions. Among these, the most disheartening critiques were by Anne Wedd. Wedd had inherited Hays’s manuscript volumes of her early love letters, organized by Hays like an epistolary novel with anecdotes, narrative interpretations and, as Marilyn Brooks has demonstrated, chunks of verbatim text from Frances Brooke’s novel A History of Emily Montague in Four volumes. By the author of Lady Julia Mandeville (1769).4 Wedd had the complete two-volume set at her disposal, as well as autobiographical materials that nolonger exist. Volume one of the manuscript “LoveLetters” is now included with other Mary Hays documents inthe Pforzheimer Collection. Volume two has not been located. Wedd had on hand Hays’s “introduction” to the letters, as well as an “autobiographical fragment” which, she subsequently judged, was “rendered superfluous” by her own published summary.5 She studied piano in Paris but failed to go on to train with the master teacher of her choice. At her death, the surviving papers she possessed were left in a mess and put in the trash by a descendant in the next generation, except for those Wedd had published or chosen to retain and left to Miss Organ or Dr. Williams’s Library. Wedd had converted to Catholicism as an adult and her reactions to Hays, who declared herself as Unitarian in 1791, were at best ambivalent6: she belittled Hays, as well as Eliza Fenwick (1766 –1840), the feminist novelist, radical and close friend of both Hays and Wollstonecraft.

Wedd’s general stance towards Hays, adopted by some critics, was amused dismissal. She advised:

Though possessed of considerable intelligence, as her subsequent history proves, [Mary Hays] was the type of young woman caricatured by Jane Austen in ‘Love and Friendship,’ and later represented with milder satire in the character of Marianne Dashwood. Mary Hays reveled in the acutest sufferings of ‘exquisite sensibility’.7

Wedd was silent about the frequent passages in The Love-Letters between Hays and her young Baptist lover, John Eccles, in which they spoke frankly of their mutual attraction, sexual foreplay and temptati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. "I Sought & Made to Myself an Extraordinary Destiny"
• 2. The Trial(s) of Queen Caroline and Hays's Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated
• 3. The Turbulent Seas of Cultural Sisterhood: French Connections in Mary Hays's Female Biography (1803)
• 4. Lost in Translation: Mary Hays Reads Heloise
• 5. The Spanish Monarchy in Mary Hays's Biographical Works
• 6. Mary Hays's Female Biography: Feminist Remix
• 7. Rioting in Intellectual Luxury: The Innovations and Influence of Mary Hays's "Catherine Macaulay Graham"
• 8. "The Very Worst Woman I Ever Heard of": Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Biography as Vindication
• 9. "Women's Writing on Women's Writing": Mayy Ziyada's Literary Biographies as Egyptian Feminist History
• Index