Even after several decades of feminist efforts to reclaim the work of female authors fallen from favor because of their “unwomanly” activities, it is still tempting to describe the novelist, historian, and social commentator Mary Hays with gossipy anecdotes from her romantic life: not only did she carry on an epistolary romance with a forbidden lover, who tragically died soon after their parents finally agreed to let them marry, but she actively pursued another man and scandalously fictionalized that pursuit in her first novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Happily, Gina Luria Walker's biography of Mary Hays contextualizes these sensational incidents within the personal, political, and literary spheres of Hays's long and intellectually productive life. While Walker does discuss Hays's romantic entanglements and other important relationships, she does so in order to demonstrate the enormous psychic costs to eighteenth-century women who strove to move beyond the traditional roles allotted to them. Walker depicts the trajectory of Hays's intellectual development from an inquisitive but insecure adolescent letter writer to a mature and authoritative scholar, summarizing Hays's key works and giving a clear sense of the groundbreaking nature of her literary achievements—achievements made all the more impressive against the background of Hays's attempts to find both satisfying personal relationships and a supportive intellectual community.

As Walker unfolds the history of Hays's literary production, she presents a writer whose style changed dramatically throughout her life even as her writings consistently explored the same issues, including “female sexual fulfillment, the necessary connection between gender and genre (specifically life-writing and the novel) and the public perils of expressing her convictions in these new forms” (2). In her first published piece, a defense of Unitarianism, Hays adopted the narrative persona of a pious and deferential woman, but encouragement and criticism from mentors such as Robert Robinson and Mary Wollstonecraft soon helped her to develop an unapologetic writing voice and become more comfortable expressing radical ideas about gender, religion, and politics. This growing sense of authority culminated in Female Biography, a six-volume collection that included pieces on 288 women, which Walker sees as Hays's crowning achievement (222). By this point in her intellectual career, Hays was able to gather information from other sources without appearing overly dependent on them, using this research to support one of her main arguments about women: they were just as capable as men and, given the right circumstances, could achieve equal greatness in the same fields.

The drastic change in writing style over the course of Hays's career was not a simple progression, but one of many dichotomies that characterized Hays's attempts to make a place for herself in the public sphere. Walker illuminates the ambivalence that was central to Hays's character, from the conflicting desires she showed in her correspondence with her fiancé (she wished to be sincere and intimate with him, emotionally and physically, while still conforming to the dictates of society that proscribed such intimacy), to “the tensions … between her compelling ambition to be recognized as a woman intellectual and her fear of exposure in the glare of public attention” (34), to the fact that she requested William Godwin's ongoing criticism of the manuscript of Memoirs of Emma Courtney but then resolutely refused most of his suggestions. As Walker puts it, by the end of the eighteenth century, “Hays's actions increasingly combined … pride with longing for acceptance, disregard for convention with naiveté, and prim judgments with bold gestures” (177). Walker rightly notes that these contradictory impulses arise from the intellectual woman's uniquely isolated position. Hays had cast off the restrictive gender roles of her society, but she “could not imagine her next identity: she saw no clear way to build upon her achievements or any feasible model to follow” (161). The result was a contradictory personality that confused and alienated others, thus increasing Hays's isolation.

Perhaps the most important of these contradictions was the seeming paradox that while Hays wished to make an original contribution to contemporary discussions of religion, politics, and gender, for most of her life she felt the need of a community to encourage her in her work and justify her opinions. Walker spends considerable time discussing Hays's supporters and mentors, from religious groups such as Unitarians and Rational Dissenters to individuals including Robert Robinson, William Frend, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. At first, the background on these people and communities might seem to digress from Walker's main focus, “the story of Mary Hays's intellectual quest” (1). However, it quickly becomes clear that because Hays acquired knowledge and developed opinions about that knowledge through her interactions with other people, the “story” of her “quest” must include their stories as well. Even in their absence, Hays's supporters continued to motivate her; Walker points out that the deaths of Robinson and Wollstonecraft, as well as Hays's fiancé John Eccles, each pushed Hays toward a greater presence in the public sphere and a greater willingness to express radical ideas, particularly about gender.

Despite her ambivalence about exposing her personal life to public view, Hays recognized that she could productively interrogate the effects of gender restrictions by investigating the extent to which her own behavior replicated or resisted gender norms. Walker enumerates many such examples—in Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous, for instance, Hays uses herself as an example of how a woman can learn and reason, while Memoirs of Emma Courtney integrates elements of Hays's history as a means of addressing philosophical questions in an imaginative form. Walker argues that this propensity for self-examination made Hays “a precursor of later intellectuals who confronted hostile audiences and public criticism for their intense interest in themselves [and] a forerunner of those women writers whose reputation as gender subversives, accurate or not, directly determined whether and how their texts were read, reviewed, remembered, or consigned to oblivion” (176–77). Walker's careful analysis of Mary Hays's literary production and personal interactions demonstrates both why she was “consigned to oblivion” for more than a century and why it is appropriate that we continue to look more closely at her work now.