ABSTRACT
Mary Hays self-consciously dedicated herself to “the idea of being free,” by which she meant self-determination and understanding. During her long life she judged people, politics, morality, and aesthetics by the degree to which they fostered or obstructed her life’s work. Hays quickly learned that because of her sex she could only participate in the republic of letters as an outsider. Hays lived the paradoxes of being a woman who sought enlightenment. Hays was a protean figure who emerged out of a complex set of cultural concerns in the late eighteenth century and who presaged profound social changes in the nineteenth century and beyond. Her interloper status allowed her unprecedented imaginative freedom that was accompanied by extreme isolation. Hays provoked strong reactions in her time to her work, to herself personally, and to the persona she created. Mary Hays preserved the materials that documented what she described as her “extraordinary destiny.”.
