ABSTRACT
In 1796 the radical author, bookseller and publisher Richard Phillips established the anti-ministerial, pro-Dissenting Monthly Magazine and British Register, which declared its intention of ‘lending aid to the propogation of those liberal principles…which have been either deserted or virulently opposed by other Periodical Miscellanies’. Mary Hays, as Wollstonecraft’s most ardent admirer, was an obvious choice for her obituarist. The two women had first met after Hays’s reading of the Rights of Woman had prompted her to send Wollstonecraft a ‘testimony of esteem’ in August 1792. In 1795, while Wollstonecraft was travelling in Scandinavia, Hays wrote to Godwin, asking him if she could borrow a copy of Political Justice. Godwin called on her to deliver the book, and a friendship of sorts developed, consisting mainly of a stream of intense letters from Hays on the subject of her unrequited love for the Unitarian William Frend.
