Mary Hays was an autodidact intellectual who published essays, poetry, novels and several works on famous women.
19 Facts About Mary Hays
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Mary Hays is remembered for her early feminism, and her close relations to dissenting and radical thinkers of her time including Robert Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and William Frend.
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Mary Hays was born in 1759, into a family of Protestant dissenters who rejected the practices of the Church of England.
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When Hays's fiance John Eccles died on the eve of their marriage, Hays expected to die of grief herself.
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Mary Hays seized the chance to make a career for herself in the larger world as a writer.
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Mary Hays left Hays all his papers, including the letters she had sent him.
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Mary Hays's first published poem, "Invocation to a Nightingale," appeared in the Lady's Poetical Magazine in 1781.
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From 1782 to 1790, Mary Hays met and exchanged letters with Robert Robinson, a minister who campaigned against the slave trade.
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Mary Hays attended the dissenting academy in Hackney in the late 1780s.
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Mary Hays contacted the publisher of the book, Joseph Johnson, which led to her friendship with Wollstonecraft and involvement with London's Jacobin intellectual circle.
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Mary Hays did not have enough money to buy Enquiry Concerning Political Justice by William Godwin.
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Mary Hays acted on Wollstonecraft's demand that women take charge of their lives and moved out of her mother's home to live as an independent woman in London.
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Mary Hays's disgrace was juicy gossip in the close-knit group of London publishing.
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Mary Hays was considered too radical and her book did not sell well.
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In 1803 Mary Hays demonstrated her continuing concern with women's lives and work, publishing Female Biography, a book in six volumes, containing the lives of 294 women from ancient figures to near contemporaries.
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In 1824 Mary Hays returned to London where she died on 20 February 1843.
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Mary Hays is buried at Abney Park Cemetery, Church Street, Stoke Newington, London.
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Mary Hays is memorialised in the Heritage Floor of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, near the place setting for Mary Wollstonecraft.
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Mary Hays's letters are held at the New York Public Library, Astor and Tilden Foundation thanks to the work of Dr Gina Luria Walker.