ABSTRACT
The autobiographical materials Anne F. Wedd consulted have vanished, but the texts that do survive attest to Hays’s ongoing quest for knowledge and concomitant ambivalence about her own ambitions. Theological inquiry among the Dissenters provided the catalyst for Hays’s search for erudition. Hays paid lip service to what society expected of her, even as she discovered her own persistent, restless curiosity that first surfaced in her correspondence with Eccles. In their communications, Robinson responded seriously to Hays’s theological and philosophical inquiries, fostering her independence while extending her contact with Enlightenment ideas. Hays directed her grief at the loss of Robinson towards new sites of knowledge, as she did after John Eccles’s death. Thus Robinson remained mired in controversy even after his death. His earlier biographers—George Dyer, Benjamin Flower, and William Robinson —attempted posthumously to pigeonhole Robinson as an adherent to one sect or another. Hays, as the pious woman, assumed the authority to join the Christian Enlightenment enterprise.
