Mary Hays

Mary Hays was an autodidact intellectual who published essays, poetry, novels, and several works on famous women. She 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. She was born in 1759, into a family of Protestant dissenters who rejected the practices of the Church of England . Hays was described by those who disliked her as the baldest disciple of Wollstonecraft by The Anti Jacobin Magazine, attacked as an unsexd female by clergyman Robert Polwhele, and provoked controversy through her long life with her rebellious writings. When Hayss fianc John Eccles died on the eve of their marriage, Hays expected to die of grief herself. But this apparent tragedy meant that she escaped an ordinary future as wife and mother, remaining unmarried. She seized the chance to make a career for herself in the larger world as a writer.

Mary Hays was born in LondonOctober 1759, the daughter of Rational Dissenters John and Elizabeth Hays.

Source: Wikipedia