ABSTRACT
Mary Hays was concerned more generally however, from her earliest published work in Letters and Essays, with using biography or personal history as a generic stepping stone to encourage women readers to develop a taste for less personalized 'history' and more abstracted 'philosophy'. Hays's use of biography reiterates the tradition of great lives, focusing on notable and exemplary women, but it also importantly revises this tradition by including notorious figures as well as those worthy of emulation. Turning from writing one's life directly to writing more obliquely the lives of women was a canny strategy as well as a financially lucrative move. This project could only have been a coherent one after the changes wrought by the French Revolution. Hays's explains her purpose in writing Female Biography in terms of her aspiration to write specifically for women. Hays's Female Biography stands as an overt intervention in expanding the political sphere to include personal life.
