SOURCE: Adams, M. Ray. “Mary Hays, Disciple of William Godwin.” In Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism, pp. 83-103. Lancaster, PA: Franklin and Marshall College, 1947.

In the following essay, Adams provides an overview of Hays's major writings and discusses Hays's relationship with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

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...