ABSTRACT
Mary Hays, 1760–1843, can arguably be considered a first generation “Romantic” writer and, moreover, one made notorious by the intersection of her life with her writings. 1 Her first novel, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), famously mined her own letters and romantic disappointment to develop the story of her heroine. Hays was concerned more generally however, from her earliest published work in Letters and Essays (1793), with using biography or personal history as a generic stepping stone to encourage women readers to develop a taste for less personalized “history” and more abstracted “philosophy.” Her encyclopedic work, Female Biography (1803), is an effort to write women’s lives and experiences into history—revising and extending the concepts of history, life-writing, and self-construction through narrative.
