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. This edition of Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Circa l’autore
Mary Hays (1759-1843) was an English writer and feminist. Born in London to a family of Protestant dissenters, Hays grew up in a politically and intellectually radical household. In 1777, she me John Eccles, with whom she exchanged dozens of letters despite her family’s disapproval of the match. Although they were eventually engaged to be married, Eccles died unexpectedly in 1780. Devastated, Hays turned her back on a life of marriage and motherhood in order to pursue a career as a writer and radical feminist. In 1792, Hays read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a groundbreaking work of political philosophy and an early feminist text that argues for the education of women as well as for the need to recognize them as rational, independent beings. Deeply inspired, Hays published her first book, Letters and Essays (1793), and befriended both Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, a writer and political philosopher whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) is considered a pioneering work on anarchism. In 1796, Hays published her most famous work, an epistolary novel titled Memoirs of Emma Courtney, an immediately controversial text that has since been recognized as one of the most important works of fiction of the 1790s. In 1803, having fallen out with Godwin, Hays struggled to publish due to her association with radical figures. Her Female Biography is a detailed work recording the lives and achievements of 294 women from the ancient to the contemporary world. Often remembered more for her connection to Wollstonecraft than for her own literary accomplishments, Hays has recently been recognized as an unjustly overshadowed figure whose fictional, historical, and philosophical works display not only a mastery of the English language, but an unwavering commitment to the feminist cause.
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