ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in September 1797 hastened Mary Hays’s withdrawal to the margins of British culture. Hays consciously took up the cudgels that languished after Wollstonecraft’s death, although she was already a target of propaganda in the mounting reprisals against radicals. Hays came to a new understanding of the power of life-writing, even in fiction, to perpetuate the meaning of a woman’s individual circumstances and render it instructive for other women. Education, as Hays’s several mentors preached, can produce progress, even freedom. The counter offensive against Hays continued with publication of Edmund Oliver, a roman à clef, in 1798. Hays’s loneliness and equivocal self-confidence led her into treacherous circumstances that made her an object of public mockery in an ever-widening social circle. Hays was the most conspicuous ‘unsex’d female’ at the century’s end, but the cold war at home continued to mobilize other women in whose work she figured as a lightening rod for feminist beliefs.
