Abstract
Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney is an antecedent of, and possible influence on, Emily Brontë. Hays’s Memoirs (1796) and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) offer parallel representations of the passionate female. While Emily’s Catherine Earnshaw has received much attention in academia, Hays’s Emma Courtney remains overlooked. I examine Emma as an early ‘Catherine’, which, in turn, reveals Hays’s and Brontë’s similar criticism of ‘respectable’, patriarchal society, which allows no place for such passionate female expression. It is not coincidental that in the course of the novels, both Emma and Catherine are continually upbraided for and warned against their wayward passionate natures, both submit to passionless marriages, and, eventually, both are either psychologically or physically destroyed.
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