ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two representations of unrequited love written in the 1790s, a short lyric by William Blake and the memoir-novel by Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney. In both the works, 'telling thy love' proves intensely problematic. Discussion draws on the context of Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman and eighteenth-century codes of female 'delicacy' that are anxious about a woman's speaking freely; however, it is argued that the issues here go beyond the gender politics of the day to a fundamental tension between public words and intimate feeling. Hays's novel is read as unfolding her ongoing argument with William Godwin about two competing models of the self: one which sees the self as relationally and affectively embedded in the world and one which emphasizes the aspiration to a proper (rational) independence.
