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In a series of letters to her son, Emma Courtney reveals the frequently tragic story of her life. Unable to marry the man she loved, she settled for marriage to a man who promises her safety and stability only to destroy her trust—and, nearly, her life. Memoirs of Emma Courtney is an epistolary novel by pioneering feminist Mary Hays.
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Mary Hays was a self-taught intellectual who wrote essays, poetry, novels, and various books about notable women. She is recognized for her early feminism and her strong relationships with dissenting and radical philosophers of her period, such as Robert Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and William Frend. She was born in 1759 into a family of Protestant separatists who opposed the practices of the Church of England (the established church). Hays was called by those who detested her as 'the baldest disciple of Wollstonecraft' by The Anti Jacobin Magazine, assailed as a 'unsex'd female' by priest Robert Polwhele, and sparked controversy throughout her long life with her defiant writings. Hays was impressed by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and after writing to her with admiration, the two women became friends. The backlash following Wollstonecraft's death and the posthumous release of her Memoirs influenced Hays' later work, which some academics have described as more conservative. Among these later productions is the six-volume compendium Female Biography: or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries, in which Wollstonecraft is not mentioned, despite the fact that Hays wrote an extensive obituary for The Annual Necrology shortly after Godwin's controversial Memoirs were published. If Wollstonecraft was overlooked in the nineteenth century, Hays and her writing received even less critical or academic attention until the twentieth century's rising feminist movement.
