Introduction

In 2009 Jennie Batchelor invited Gina Luria Walker to serve as Editor of the Chawton House Library Edition of Mary Hays’s Female Biography. The collaboration generated such a wealth of new research and analysis from 2009 to 2014 that Female Biography can be construed more generally as a litmus test of women’s access to knowledge on the cusp of the nineteenth century. Mary Spongberg points to the misrepresentation of Hays as a “Victorian” rather than a radical feminist historian, and her “pioneering documentation of the perils of misogyny that even royal women encounter.” Like Wollstonecraft, many of the women Hays depicts were ‘great souls’, but they too were shackled by the distinction of sex. By studying individual lives Hays endeavoured to create an overarching history of women that linked their struggles to overcome the distinction of sex with their achievements and ideas. Hays’s Iberian female biographies include ideological warnings related to intolerance and religious fanaticism.