The essays included in Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism emerge from the authors’ collaboration in producing the first modern edition of Hays’s work in the Chawton House Library Edition (2013, 2014). This book explores Hays’s larger ambitions to lay the foundation for an encyclopaedic work by, for, and about women. The scholars’ contributions to this volume engage with some of the multiple problems and possibilities that Female Biography presented. Drawing on this effort, individual scholars examine Hays’s attempts to correct existing masculinist constructs which framed the ‘universe of knowledge’ then and persist in our time. Hays perceived that these had the cumulative effect of rendering women invisible. She responded to such absence by providing examples of the extent of female worth across Western society. Other contributions focus specifically on the subjects of Hays’s entries, looking at how she used source material and laid the groundwork for future biographical studies of women’s lives. Both Female Biography and Hays herself have continually presented difficulties in categorization: not quite Enlightenment, not quite Victorian either. This book recontextualizes her work, demonstrating the radicalism and originality of her feminism, even in its post-Wollstonecraftian phase, as well as the longevity of her influence. As such, it will be of interest to those conducting research into Hays, her subjects, and the evolution of life-writing by women. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

Mary Hays worked alone in compiling the 302 entries that make up Female Biography (1803). By contrast, producing a modern, critical edition of the work relied on the expertise of 168 scholars across 18 countries. Essays in this collection focus on the exhaustive research, editorial challenges and innovative responses involved in this project.

Mary Hays was a radical feminist whose writings brought her to the attention of her contemporaries William Blake, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Her Female Biography is an ambitious and acclaimed work, covering the lives of 294 women.

Taking into account the popularity and variety of the genre, this collaborative volume considers a wide range of English Romantic autobiographical writers and modes, including working-class autobiography, the familiar essay, and the staged presence. In the wake of Rousseau's Confessions, autobiography became an increasingly popular as well as a literary mode of writing. By the early nineteenth century, this hybrid and metamorphic genre is found everywhere in English letters, in prose and poetry by men and women of all classes. As such, it resists attempts to provide a coherent historical account or establish a neat theoretical paradigm. The contributors to Romantic Autobiography in England embrace the challenge, focusing not only on major writers such as William Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Mary Shelley, but on more recent additions to the canon such as Mary Robinson, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Hays. There are also essays on the scandalous Memoirs of Mrs. Billington and on Joseph Severn's autobiographical scripting of himself as "the friend of Keats." The result is an exploratory and provisional mapping of the field, provocative rather than exhaustive, intended to inspire future scholarship and teaching.

Taking into account the popularity and variety of the genre, this collaborative volume considers a wide range of English Romantic autobiographical writers and modes, including working-class autobiography, the familiar essay, and the staged presence. In the wake of Rousseau's Confessions, autobiography became an increasingly popular as well as a literary mode of writing. By the early nineteenth century, this hybrid and metamorphic genre is found everywhere in English letters, in prose and poetry by men and women of all classes. As such, it resists attempts to provide a coherent historical account or establish a neat theoretical paradigm. The contributors to Romantic Autobiography in England embrace the challenge, focusing not only on major writers such as William Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Mary Shelley, but on more recent additions to the canon such as Mary Robinson, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Hays. There are also essays on the scandalous Memoirs of Mrs. Billington and on Joseph Severn's autobiographical scripting of himself as "the friend of Keats." The result is an exploratory and provisional mapping of the field, provocative rather than exhaustive, intended to inspire future scholarship and teaching.

The "Jacobin" novel was labeled as such in Britain because of its supposed connections to the French Revolution. This book takes an in-depth look at these novels, written between 1790 and 1805. She centers on the group surrounding Wollstonecraft and Godwin, although not exclusively, exploring the limits of their philosophy of human rights and personal subjectivity. Unlike other recent scholars, the author treats both male and female writers, making feminism an aspect of the work but not the overriding one. While the novels are the main focus, other work by the writers is considered as it pertains to their beliefs. She also discusses the reaction from those who defined the "Jacobins" by opposing them.