SOURCE: Tompkins, J. M. S. The Polite Marriage, pp. 150-90. London: Cambridge University Press, 1938.

In the following excerpt, Tompkins analyzes how Hays's notably brash, Godwinian character and philosophical beliefs are reflected in her novels, particularly The Memoirs of Emma Courtney.

Of all the small writers whom [we] commemorate, Mary Hays is the least likely to be quite forgotten. This is not because of the quality of her literary work, which is, with the exception of The Scotch Parents, the worst we have handled, since she rejected the discipline of eighteenth-century taste and acquired no other; but because she passed many years of her life on the edge of a circle that is still intrinsically interesting to us. She was the occasion of characteristic utterances by Lamb, Southey and Coleridge, and is to be found modestly posted in explanatory footnotes to their correspondence. She knew Mary Wollstonecraft, and was...