Description
Mary Hays (1759?1843)
The Growth of a Woman's Mind
Author: Walker Gina Luria
Language: EnglishKeywords
Rational Dissenting; Younger Man; Warrington Academy; Cursory Remarks; Female Biography; Mary Wollstonecraft; Wollstonecraft’s Death; Anna Barbauld; Gainsford Street; Benjamin Flower; Wollstonecraft’s Letters; Violates; Progressive Marriage; Hays’s Texts; Catharine Cappe; Heterodox Dissenters; Godwin’s Memoirs; Oriental Tale; LCS; Hays’s Memoir; Hazardous Experiment; Love Letters; Hays’s Project; Draws Back; Vice Versa
Publication date: 01-2024
· 15.2x22.9 cm · Paperback
Publication date: 12-2017
· 15.2x22.9 cm · Hardback
Description
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/li>Biography
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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.
Gina Luria Walker is Professor of Women's Studies and Director of The New Historia at the The New School in New York City.