“I Sought & Made to Myself an Extraordinary Destiny”

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay traces the difficulties over more than forty years in recovering an accurate “female biography” of Mary Hays. In doing so, I explore the intellectual and affective relationship between the female biographer and her female subject. Mary Hays was known as a peripheral associate of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin when I began my doctoral research in 1969. Even the discovery of an archive of her correspondence and other papers in private hands in London could not dispel the “buried life” she seemed to live as she grew older. The recent extensive research of Dr. Timothy Whelan into the papers of Henry Crabb Robinson and his circle reveals that Hays was at the center of a Unitarian network of learned women, and that her later life was in fact filled with family and friends who appreciated her generous generativity, especially two generations of nieces. Whelan's discoveries made it possible to track the intrusions and deletions of a series of earlier editors into Hays's own accounts, attesting to the complex responses and representations of one female figure by another. I suggest that these twin interrogations make further recovery necessary.