The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader

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Gina Luria Walker
Broadview Press, 9. dets 2005 - 343 pages

Mary Hays (1759-1843) is often best remembered for her early revolutionary novels The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. In this collection, however, Gina Luria Walker reveals the extraordinary range of Hays’s oeuvre. The selections are mainly from Hays’s non-fiction writings, including letters, life-writing, political commentary, and essays. The extracts demonstrate her importance as an advanced and innovative thinker, philosophical commentator, and writer of deliberately experimental fiction.

This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and full annotation. Texts by numerous other writers are interleaved chronologically with Hays’s writings to illustrate her idiosyncratic intellectual genealogy, how her understanding modulated over time, and the multiple ways in which she influenced and was influenced by the most significant issues and figures of her age.

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Contents

Acknowledgements
9
Chapter Three 1793 156
17
Robert Southey
18
A Brief Chronology
23
Chapter One 177981
36
Edward Young
89
Gilbert Wakefield
115
Anna Barbauld
131
Helvétius in The Cabinet
223
Richard Polwhele
247
Women of all Ages and Countries Alphabetically Arranged in
264
Chapter Six 181436
283
Mary Shelley
299
Capel Lofft
312
William Beloe
315
Selected Reviews of Hayss Publications
325

William Frend
149
Joseph Priestley
184
Matthew Prior
209
Select Bibliography
335
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About the author (2005)

Gina Luria Walker is Chair of the Department of Social Sciences at The New School, New York. She is the co-editor of the Broadview edition of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2001) and has published widely on Romantic literature and Enlightenment feminisms.

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