Mary Hays and the Forms of Life

JULIE MURRAY Mary Hays and the Forms ofLife T HE 1790’s RADICAL WRITER MARY HAYS, BEST KNOWN FOR HER BY TURNS painfully earnest and, to some, utterly scandalous 1796 fictional autobi­ ography The Memoirs of Emma Courtney, found it impossible to avoid weighing in on the infamous “Queen Caroline Affair” of 1820. Precipi­ tated by the Queen’s return to Britain after many years in exile, having been unceremoniously dismissed by the Prince Regent in favor of his pre­ ferred mistress, the divorce trial galvanized public opinion in Britain and became a particular cause celebre of political radicals.1 Discussing Queen Caroline in her 1821 Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated, Hays in­ vokes Edmund Burke’s famous lament for the passing ofthe age of chivalry in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Describing the collective response to the Queen’s ostensibly shabby treatment, Hays writes: Burke, had he now lived, would have retracted his assertion, that the age of chivalry had passed away; it revived, in all its impassioned 1. For discussions of the Queen Caroline Affair, see Thomas Laqueur, “The Queen Caro­ line Affair: Politics as Art in the Keign of George iv,”Journal ofModern History 54 (September 1982): 417—66; Anna Clark, “Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820,” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 47—68; and Dror Wahrman, “‘MiddleClass ’ Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria,” TheJournal of British Studies 32, no. 4 (October 1993): 396-432. Gary Kelly ob­ serves: “The coronation of George iv and the return of his long-estranged consort to claim her royal rights focused popular opposition to the monarch and the entire system of‘Old Corruption.’ The king’s extravagance, his mistresses, decades ofscandal surrounding him and his brothers, his failure to maintain his youthful support for political and institutional reform, recent economic distress, rioting, Luddism, the ‘Peterloo Massacre’, and demands for Catho­ lic emancipation—these events seemed to culminate in what was seen as a glaring instance of court government’s exploitation of women, now a symbol for many vocal but powerless groups in society. . . . T. & J. Allman, who published books for the popular market and ad­ vertised themselves as ‘Booksellers to Her Majesty’, commissioned Hays, as a writer familiar with issues of the wronged woman and experienced in writing female biography, to produce a book for the occasion, Memoirs ofQueens Illustrious and Celebrated, published in the summer of 1821” {Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-102/ [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 257-58. SiR, 52 (Spring 2013) 61 62 JULIE MURRAY fervour, amidst the soberest and gravest people in the civilized world. Every manly mind shrank from the idea of driving, by protracted and endless persecutions, a desolate unprotected female from her family, her rank, from society and from the world. Woman considered it as a common cause against the despotism and tyranny of man. . . . With the feudal institutions fell the childish privileges and degrad­ ing homage paid to the sex; and to equity not gallantry do they now prefer their claim. Oppression and proscription, it is true, still linger, but old things appear to be passing away; and, in another century probably, should the progress of knowledge bear any proportion to its accelerated march during the latter half of the past, all things will become new.2 This is a stunning series ofclaims coming, as they do, from the same writer who twenty years earlier published her novel The Victim ofPrejudice (1799), often referred to as a female version of William Godwin’s 1796 Caleb Wil­ liams. Whereas the Hays of 1799 would have argued in stark contrast to Burke that chivalry was alive and well in the form of “barbarous prejudice” and the victimizations wrought by distinctions of rank, here she argues from the other side, insisting that a reformed chivalry is happily robust.3 By 1820, the “feudal institutions” appear to have fallen away, as has the “de­ grading homage” paid to women. Particularly striking is the Whiggish stance captured by her claim that “old things appear to be passing away and in another century all things will become new,” especially given that she writes this...