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Mary Hays’s “Female Biography”: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism

This collection of essays on Mary Hays’s Female Biography or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries (London, 1803; American edition 1807) appeared originally in a special issue of Women’s Writing dedicated to Mary Hays, to celebrate publication of the Chawton House edition of her works. It is edited by the compilers of that special issue, Gina Luria Walker and Mary Spongberg. Most of the essays discuss aspects of Hays’s work as a biographer. But two of them are on more recent biographies of women (Marie Mulvey Roberts on Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and Hala Kama on the twentieth-century Egyptian feminists Malak Hifni Nassif [1886– 1918], Aisha Taymur [1840–1902], and Warda al-Yaziji [1838–1924]). Although there is no connection between Hays and these later biographies and their subjects, they may nonetheless be said to be in the spirit of Mary Hays. Hays has, until now, been rather in the shadows of feminism. She struggled in her own day to live her principles in the hostile climate of post-French-Revolution Britain, and her posthumous reputation has been clouded by prudish disapproval of her on the part of the guardians of her letters, exemplifying a species of what Walker justly describes as “female mysogyny.” Today Hays is more often than not viewed through the prism of her more famous contemporaries, Jane Austen and her friend and fellow feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. But comparisons have not served her well. Although herself a novelist, and outspoken on the social and economic condition of women, Hays’s reputation as a writer has suffered for not being Jane Austen, and her feminist radicalism has been overshadowed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s reputation. In Hay’s own time, Elisabeth Hamilton mercilessly satirized her in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Despite its real publishing success and lasting influence, Hays’s Female Biography has too readily been denigrated as “derivative” or “hack work.” She was criticized for including women of dubious sexual morals (for example, Catherine the Great and Heloise), a fact that her Victorian readers found unsettling. Fortunately, in Walker, Hays has been blessed with a latter-day champion who has done sterling work to restore her to visibility and sympathetic understanding as a woman writer, intellectual, and early feminist of significance. By contextualizing particular biographies from Female Biography and her Memoirs of Queens, this set of essays