SOURCE: Rajan, Tilottama. “Autonarration and genotext in Mary Hays' Memoirs of Emma Courtney.” In Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789-1837, edited by Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright, pp. 213-39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Rajan refutes critics who consider Memoirs of Emma Courtney scandalously autobiographical, suggesting instead that the novel is a self-conscious attempt to explore the relationship between experience and textuality.

I

Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman, long written out of the canon by being used as a source-book for her life, has recently become an object of serious attention. Mary Hays' Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796),¹ however, remains the victim of a reduction of text to biography that fails to recognize its complex interimplication of textuality and reality. Hays' novel is based on the story of her unreturned passion for the Cambridge radical William Frend. Its autobiographical nature...