ABSTRACT
The love letters Mary Hays exchanged between 1779–80 with John Eccles, a young Baptist, express her early and abiding frustration at the gulf between male and female education, among even so enlightened a group as the Rational Dissenters. In the love letters Hays meditates on Eloisa’s celebration of women’s right to love passionately outside the bounds of marriage. Hays intimates that sexuality may be a vehicle for autonomy, either as personal fulfillment or submission. Hays’s “Love Letters” book begins with her entrance into the world of romantic travail. Hays are a willing co-conspirator with Eccles at the outset of their illicit correspondence. Eccles takes up Hays’s theme that women are innately more constant than men both by nature and education. Hays are never relieved of her sense of the censorious world always watching, even if unseen. In the decades to come, the mature Hays will call upon her relationship with Eccles to question the confines of her gender.
