Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) is a novel by English writer and feminist Mary Hays. Inspired by events from her own life, as well as by her acquaintance with radical political philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Hays’s novel received mixed reviews and was controversial for its representation of female sexuality, adultery, infanticide, and suicide. Modern critics and readers, however, have recognized the novel as a groundbreaking work of feminist fiction. In a series of letters to her adopted son Augustus Harley, Emma Courtney reveals the tragic details of her life. Young and in love with Augustus’s father, Courtney dreamed of marrying him and starting a family. Despite their true connection, Harley is unable to marry—his continued income is only guaranteed, he claims, if he remains a bachelor. Meanwhile, a man named Mr. Montague promises Courtney a life of safety and financial stability if she will agree to marry him, which, after learning that Harley has secretly been married all along, she does. Heartbroken, Courtney settles for a life with her new husband, and raising her daughter becomes her only cause for passion. When she realizes the extent of Mr. Montague’s dishonesty, however, she struggles to reconcile her former sense of individuality with the life she has been forced to live. When Harley suddenly reappears, however, feelings from the past return that threaten to flood Courtney’s heart and overturn what stability she thought had been her own. Memoirs of Emma Courtney is an epistolary novel exploring themes of desire, inequality, and the love that transcends the values and bonds of society. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Mary Hays (1759-1843) is often best remembered for her early revolutionary novels The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. In this collection, however, Gina Luria Walker reveals the extraordinary range of Hays’s oeuvre. The selections are mainly from Hays’s non-fiction writings, including letters, life-writing, political commentary, and essays. The extracts demonstrate her importance as an advanced and innovative thinker, philosophical commentator, and writer of deliberately experimental fiction. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and full annotation. Texts by numerous other writers are interleaved chronologically with Hays’s writings to illustrate her idiosyncratic intellectual genealogy, how her understanding modulated over time, and the multiple ways in which she influenced and was influenced by the most significant issues and figures of her age.

Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation of narrative itself with the governmental apparatus of the Novel. Exploring the role of narrativity in the works of Romantic writers, Rajan also reflects on larger disciplinary issues such as the role of poetry versus prose in an emergent modernity and the place of Romanticism itself in a Victorianized nineteenth century. While engaging both genres, Romantic Narrative responds to the current critical shift from poetry to prose by concentrating, paradoxically, on a poetics of narrative in Romantic prose fiction. Rajan argues that poiesis, as a mode of thinking, is Romanticism’s legacy to an age of prose. She elucidates this thesis through careful readings of Shelley’s Alastor and his Gothic novels, Godwin’s Caleb Williams and St. Leon, Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman. Rajan, winner of the Keats-Shelley Association's Distinguished Lifetime Award and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is one of Romanticism’s leading scholars. Effective, articulate, and readable, Romantic Narrative will appeal to scholars in both nineteenth-century studies and narrative theory.

In November of 1795, after William Godwin requested a sketch of Mary Hays’ life, she arrived at the idea of Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Godwin followed up his request with a “hint” that a fictional exploration of the painful experience she had undergone in her relationship with William Frend might help her to come to terms with it. It was to be an “instructive rather than self indulgent” work. The resulting novel is one of the most interesting and important explorations of gender-related issues of the time. Emma is exposed to a series of situations—motherlessness, orphanhood, poverty, dependence, and more—which encourage her to reflect “on the inequalities of society, the source of every misery and vice, and on the peculiar disadvanteges of my sex.” The novel quickly became viewed as “a scandalous disrobing in public” but it has endured as much on the basis of its readability as on its pointed social commentary.

The founder of the Preemptive Love Coalition, an organization based in Iraq that provides heart surgeries to Iraqi children and trains local doctors and nurses, presents an account of lifesaving and peacemaking in this war-torn country.

"Sloane Jacobsen is the most powerful trend forecaster in the world ... and global fashion, lifestyle, and tech companies pay to hear her opinions about the future. Her recent forecasts on the family are unwavering: the world is overpopulated, and with unemployment, college costs, and food prices all on the rise, having children is an extravagant indulgence. So it's no surprise when the tech giant Mammoth hires Sloane to lead their groundbreaking annual conference, celebrating the voluntarily childless. But not far into her contract, Sloane begins to sense the undeniable signs of a movement against electronics that will see people embracing compassion, empathy, and 'in-personism' again"--