ABSTRACT
Mary Hays’s pride may have taken a blow, but her feminism and her admiration for Wollstonecraft remained intact. Her second work of fiction, A Victim of Prejudice, clearly influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished Wrongs of Woman, confronted issues of rape and illegitimacy, leading to attacks on Hays in the conservative journals. Hays refused to be deflected from her increasingly solitary position as a defender of Wollstonecraft and her beliefs. Her memoir is written with a full acknowledgement of the ‘extraordinary degree of attention’ which has been paid to Wollstonecraft since her death, and undertakes a vindication of her principles and conduct which seems partly to be predicated on Hays’s own recent experiences. Hays outlasted all her contemporaries, even the long-lived Godwin. After Godwin’s death Mary Shelley wrote to inform her mother’s old friend and admirer.
