ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the representation of reading in Mary Hays’s fi rst novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). It demonstrates that the reading practices of Hays’s heroine owe more to the philosophy of the French thinker Claude-Adrien Helvétius than that of her early mentor and leading fi gure in the ‘new science of mind’ which infl uenced the Jacobin novel of the 1790s, William Godwin. In particular, Helvétius’s belief in the formative, overriding infl uence of feelings and passions on the development of character is shown to affect Emma Courtney’s reading, with negative consequences. Her passionate reading of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse is especially damaging in the long term, and is the subject of parody in the novel which was seen as a direct response to Hays’s text, Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). Attention focuses particularly on the characters of Bridgetina Botherim and Julia Delmond in Hamilton’s novel, who embody two of the most dangerous aspects of Emma’s self-obsessed reading. Yet to say that Hamilton’s novel simply parodies Hays’s, and the reading habits of its heroine, is a little too straightforward. The fi nal section of the chapter argues that Hays, like Hamilton, seeks to encourage an active, critical way of reading, which neither foregrounds the self nor subsumes it entirely in the text. Both authors, I claim, try to promote a way of reading which combines enthusiastic passion with rational analysis, feeling with reason.
