Hays, Mary

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she's okay until she tangles with Burke
More on the Wrongs of Woman in the 18th century

The Victim of Prejudice.
Mary Hays
Manufacturer: Broadview Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1551112175

Book Description

Mary Hays was an outspoken Radical intellectual in the turbulent decade of the 1790's. She argued vehemently for the need to recognise the moral and rational qualities of women, the necessity of a better system of education for girls, and the importance of giving women without fortunes a career without 'servitude in prostitution.'

The Victim of Prejudice--Hays' second novel, first published in 1799--is a powerful indictment of man-made institutions such as the courts and legislative systems which favour persons of wealth and rank. In the novel the metaphor of women's confinement becomes real as the heroine's worst nightmares, her horrors and sense of helplessness become a physical reality.

The Victim of Prejudice is of great interest for its strong feminist content, and it is both powerful and moving as a literary work; this edition makes this important late eighteenth-century text again available to a wide readership.

Customer Reviews:

she's okay until she tangles with Burke.......2001-03-15

Mary Hays, an early British feminist writers, was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and William Blake, and like them she was excited by the French Revolution and the prospect of toppling the privileged classes. Of course, at that time all men were comparatively privileged, at least as compared to women. In The Victim of Prejudice she mounts a twin attack on the lowly status of women within society and on the exalted status of the landed gentry, who still dominated life in that pre-industrial age. The former attack is fairly successful, the latter is not.

Mary Raymond, the heroine of the novel, is orphaned at an early age, but is raised and well-educated (perhaps too well for the time) by her guardian, Mr. Raymond. Two brothers, sons of the Honorable Mr. Pelham, come to Mr. Raymond's for instruction too, and Mary falls in love with William Pelham, and he with her. But Mary is an unacceptable match for such a wealthy youth, more unacceptable than she realizes until Mr. Raymond reluctantly reveals the sordid circumstances of her birth, and so the young lovers are separated.

Meanwhile, Sir Peter Osborne, the brutal local landowner, has taken a fancy to Mary and is reluctant to accept her protestations of his advances. In a symbol laden early scene, William coaxes the teenage Mary into stealing some "forbidden fruit" from Osborne's vineyard. But he catches her and expels her from the garden, calling her "a true daughter of Eve." In the ensuing years they have several more equally unfortunate encounters, with Osborne becoming ever more determined to have her. Finally, after the death of Mr. Raymond, who had tried to get her to accept a more appropriate marriage offer to no avail, has left Mary particularly vulnerable, with no money and nowhere to go, Osborne kidnaps and rapes her.

At this point William returns to the scene and finds Mary wandering, broken and ill. Though by now married to another, he nurses her back to health. But when he proposes that she become his mistress, the outraged Mary refuses and flees. She tries to find employment several places but finds that her reputation as a fallen woman, resulting not merely from the incident with Osborne but from her time with the married William, follows her, causing scandal and encouraging other men to be forward with her.

Throughout these various travails, she remains admirably loyal to the moral upbringing which Mr. Raymond provided :

'Let it come then!' exclaimed I with fervour; 'Let my ruin be complete! Disgrace, indigence, contempt, while unmerited, I dare encounter, but not the censure of my own heart. Dishonour, death itself, is a calamity less insupportable than self-reproach. Amidst the destruction of my hopes, the wreck of my fortunes, of my fame, my spirit still triumphs in conscious rectitude; nor would I, intolerable as is the sense of my wrongs and of my griefs, exchange them for all that guilty prosperity could bestow.'

but is quite annoyingly passive in the face of these injustices :

I revolved in my mind, selected, and rejected, as new obstacles occurred to me, a variety of plans. Difficulties almost insuperable, difficulties peculiar to my sex, my age, and my unfortunate situation, opposed themselves to my efforts on every side. I sought only the bare means of subsistence: amidst the luxuriant and the opulent, who surrounded me, I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist!

Somehow this ambition--mere existence-- just seems inadequate. More appropriate, particularly as long as her life is ruined anyway, would be to wreak a horrific vengeance on the reprehensible Lord Peter. But as the rather unfortunate title of the book indicates, this is a story about unrelenting victimization. And because Mary never really seeks to do more than exist, never even seeks redress against Osborne, she somehow makes herself a participant in her own victimization.

A system which would punish the victim rather than the rapist is so obviously unjust, that the purely feminist angle of the story does work to a degree. However, Osborne is so awful that it is hard to accept him as a genuinely representative figure of the British aristocracy. Eleanor Ty, editor of the Broadview Text edition of the book, suggests in her introduction that the character Osborne is intended as a specific rebuke to Edmund Burke and his conservative views on the value of ancient institutions like the aristocracy. Though I'm a fan of Burke, there are coherent arguments to be made in opposition to his theories : this is not one.

The book works well enough as a kind of Gothic thriller, and is adequate as a protofeminist tract, but it fails as a radical polemic against the prevailing institutions of the time. The existence of one evil fictional nobleman doesn't serve to turn 18th Century Britain into a den of horrors.

GRADE : C+

More on the Wrongs of Woman in the 18th century.......2000-08-08

Mary Hays's "The Victim of Prejudice" is the story of Mary Raymond, a young woman, who, from birth, seems destined to suffer. The 'prejudice' of the title consists of unfair societal standards that exclude all but the wealthy, well-born, and influential. Mary is raised by her guardian, Mr. Raymond, on a small estate in the country, where he teaches her far more than any woman of her class and birth is expected to know by society.

From her youth, Mary is tormented and pursued by Sir Peter Osborne - a depraved example of the type of man Raymond warns Mary about that are out in the world. At Raymond's death, Mary is thrown out into that world to fend for herself, and the virtues and knowledge taught her by her guardian are all put to the test.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel "Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman," Hays short novel is a work meant to display feminist indignation at the treatment of women in the late 18th century. Also like Wollstonecraft, Hays appropriates some of the motifs of gothic fiction to underscore the extreme evils that men, law, and society are allowed to perpetrate against women. "The Victim of Prejudice" can tend toward melodrama, but is an important text of early British feminism and illustrates the domestic and personal concerns of the female Romantics.

Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Adeline Mowbray; or the Mother and the Daughter (Eighteenth-Century Literature)
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Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Adeline Mowbray; or the Mother and the Daughter (Eighteenth-Century Literature)
Mary Hays , and Amelia Alderson Opie
Manufacturer: College Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0967912199

Book Description

This edition pairs Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) with Amelia Alderson Opie's Adeline Mowbray; or the Mother and the Daughter (1804). Emma Courtney represents the radical side of the debates in England about appropriate behavior for women in love at the end of the eighteenth century. Adeline Mowbray has been more often read as a warning about the dangers of putting into practice the radical reforms advocated by women like Hays. Reading together these novels by women who were both close friends and associates of Mary Wollstonecraft in the heady revolutionary days complicates their easy division into "radical" and "conservative" or "Jacobin" and "anti-Jacobin" categories. Debates of the time on abolition, childhood education, rakish masculinity, and the consequences for women of sexuality outside of marriage are central to both of these novels, and readily explored by offering both under a single cover. The College Publishing edition includes an introductory essay detailing the importance and problems of biographical approaches to these two novels in particular, and works by women writers in general. Additional short essays are interpolated throughout, providing helpful contextual material, while the varied responses of eighteenth and nineteenth-century readers are represented by a selection of contemporary reviews of each novel in the appendix.

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IT WAS A GREAT BOOK
what a great book
A wonderful book called the jazz man
weak for a Newbery
A Bit of a Disappointment

The Jazz Man
Mary Hays Weik
Manufacturer: Aladdin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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IT WAS A GREAT BOOK.......2003-04-15

THE JAZZ MAN WAS A GREAT BOOK.IT HAD GREAT PICTURES.THE ARTIST WAS VERY ARTISTIC WITH THE PICTURES.I DON'T THINK IT WAS BORING AT ALL.

what a great book.......2003-04-15

This book is one of the best books I've ever read and I'm 12 so it is for all ages and people.I've given this book 5 stars because it was so good.I wish I could buy it!I only read this book for my class novel to read,but it was still good.

A wonderful book called the jazz man.......2003-02-16

Ok I thought the book was wonderful. It gave you so much detail.

First- It didn't matter whether he had a lame leg or not. He still got around what ever he did because he could walk up and down stairs.

Next- His mother and father didn't leave him. It was just a dream he had about his mother and father leaving him and there not being any food.

Then- He walks down the stairs andacross the street. He sees the jazz man, tony, Manuel, and Ernie plaing there instuments. He goes in to the resturtant and here's a voice and it sounds like his father. He looks up and it is his father.He wakes up and sees his father and mother.

That is my point of view of the jazz man.

weak for a Newbery.......2001-10-29

First of all, the boy's disability was hardly worth mentioning. I have known three people (one of them my father) who had one leg shorter than the other since childhood and walked with distinct limps. Their limps never prevented them from doing anything they wanted to do. It seems highly unlikely that this boy would have been permitted to stay out of school.

Second, the descriptions of the music didn't make me feel anything; they were just words. I've read writing that sounded like music, but this wasn't it.

Third, there was no explanation for the parents' behavior, why they left, or why they returned. In real life, the boy would likely blame himself for their leaving.

It has occurred to me that the last page and a half may be meant to take place in heaven after the boy has died of starvation.

A Bit of a Disappointment.......2001-01-25

The Jazz Mary Hays Weik was a disappointment. I probably expected too much from it. When I read about the very short book, I thought that it sounded like a children's version of the James Baldwin short story "Sonny's Blues." "Sonny's Blues" is a marvelous story set in Harlem about a man who lives in his music. The Jazz Man reaches none of its brilliance. It does capture the ability of music to music to brighten a dull life, but this book doesn't treat some matters well enough. Social problems which could have been explored were not, and the relationship between the main character, Zeke, and his parents was not developed. The book is an interesting read. It is worth the fifteen minutes that it takes to read it, though it did have flaws. Do read "Sonny's Blues."

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Misinformation unfortunate In easy-reading 1st Novel
Great story and characters.
Realistic characters, makes you think
My favorite book of the year
An incredible first novel

Learning to Drive : A Novel
Mary Hays
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Raised as a Christian Scientist in upstate New York, Charlotte McGuffey has always striven to be perfect and has trusted the power of her thoughts to protect her from life’s troubles. But when her newly estranged husband dies on a trip out of town, leaving her to raise their two young sons on her own, Charlotte realizes that her problems are too complex for her to master with the power of her mind alone.

Accompanied by her boys, Charlotte goes to the family’s summer home in Beede, Vermont, where her husband, Mel, was last seen alive, to look for answers about his final days and to grapple with her feelings of confusion and guilt surrounding his death. As Charlotte explores this new world, she is befriended by her neighbors in Beede—a colorful lot who are concerned, helpful, very human, and decidedly imperfect. Among them are a kind and perceptive postmistress/reporter, a garrulous caretaker, and an unlikely suitor—a joyous and charismatic artist at war with conventional thinking.

In this eclectic environment, Charlotte begins to explore her own feelings and question the fundamental beliefs she’s accepted her whole life. To triumph, she must untangle her family’s doctored past and brave encounters with painful truths she has never wanted to face.

In this bighearted, lush, and graceful debut novel, Mary Hays portrays the strength of the human spirit in times of crisis and the ways in which community can foster individual growth. Learning to Drive stakes claim to a world in which all things solid seem to shape-shift, people juggle reality to fit their beliefs, and women are deeply passionate about the choices they make.

Customer Reviews:

Misinformation unfortunate In easy-reading 1st Novel.......2005-09-11

While writing an easy-to-read book is certainly a gift of the author's, she is either grossly misinformed or ignorantly misinterpreting the life of Mary Baker Eddy and the healing practice of Christian Science. As a student of this Science, I found the references to it throughout the book untrue, definitely biased, and certainly unfair. Therefore, the main character's torment over whether or not she should stick with her beliefs about Christian Science and her final decision not to were not surprising nor unexpected, for with that degree of understanding (or rather, misunderstanding) of this religion's foundation and precepts, she surely made the right choice. For anyone interested in obtaining factual and accurate information about the life of Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science, I advise reading the following:

"Retrospection and Introspection" by Mary Baker Eddy
"Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer" by Yvonne Cache von Feltweis and Robert Townsend Warneck
"Mary Baker Eddy" by Robert Peel (3 Volumes: I. The Years of Discovery II. The Years of Trial III. The Years of Authority
"Mary Baker Eddy" Radcliffe Biography Series by Gillian Gill

Great story and characters........2003-12-23

I find it hard to believe this is a first novel for the author. The way she tells the story is seamless, and she has a way of making you feel like you are in the moment with each character. I was slightly put off at first because in the beginning this book seems like a commercial for Christian Science, but it is really nothing like that. This is a wonderful book...one you will want to read many times.

Realistic characters, makes you think.......2003-11-12

This book is more than just a story. It also examines the effect of philosophy/theology on real life. Hays draws her characters with sympathy and hope. A refreshingly different work. I hope to read many more from this author1

My favorite book of the year.......2003-09-29

For me, it's not the big stories, the telling of complicated histories affected by extraordinary events, it's the stories where a profound shift takes place in regular people, that change me in some way. The characters in "Learning to Drive" are so understandable,imperfect,and brave in their circumstances, I found myself reading much slower toward the end so that the book would not be over too soon. To my delight, I found that long after finishing the book, I think of the characters often with great fondness. Amy Peberdy

An incredible first novel.......2003-09-25

I always know when I am reading a specially well-written book when I stop galloping along the story line and start dawdling among the paragraphs. "Learning to Drive" is about a woman freeing herself from her Christian Science beliefs during a move to Vermont. The characters and countryside come to life in this bright, colorful book. Ms. Hayes has a wonderful imagination, and a great, slightly wacky, sense of humor that is all the better for being a little subtle.
I read this book twice and am sure I will read it again...

Female Biography: Or memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries

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Female Biography: Or memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries
Mary Hays
Manufacturer: Edition Synapse
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 4902454017

Book Description

'My pen has been taken up in the cause, and for the benefit of my own sex. For their improvement, and to their entertainment, my labours have been devoted...I have at heart the happiness of my sex, and their advancement in the grand scale of rational and social existence.'

--From the Preface by Mary Hays

Published in 1803 by Mary Hays, famous for her relationship with Mary Wollestonecraft, this collection of female biographies is now considered as the very first major reference of women, for women, written by a woman.

The work includes approximately 290 women from the classical period up to the 17th century, of which a third are British.

Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford World's Classics (Oxford University Press).)

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One of the great political novels of the 1790s
One of the great political novels of the 1790s
Different, but not great.

Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford World's Classics (Oxford University Press).)
Mary Hays
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

First published in the turbulent decade following the French Revolution, Memoirs of Emma Courtney is based on Mary Hays' own passionate struggle with romance and Enlightenment philosophy. A feminist and ardent disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft, Hays reveals the lamentable gap between `what women are' and `what woment ought to be'. The novel is one of the most articulate and detailed expressions of the yearnings and frustrations of a woman living in late eighteenth-century English society. It questions marital arrangements and courtship rituals by depicting a woman who actively pursues the man she loves. The novel explores the links between sexuality, desire, and economic and social freedom, suggesting the need for improvement in the laws of society which `have enslaved, enervated, and degraded woman'.

Customer Reviews:

One of the great political novels of the 1790s.......2001-04-29

Any fan of Mary Wollstonecraft should turn next to books like this one. Hays's novel is part of the first wave of responses to *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792) and shows that Wollstonecraft could produce thoughtful responses from British radicals that balance the unthinking ones from conservatives. With Amelia Opie's *Adeline Mowbray*, this novel tells us much about early British feminism and its interest in the novel. Broadview's texts, furthermore, are excellent and provide wonderful supporting materials; this one is no exception.

One of the great political novels of the 1790s.......2001-04-29

Different, but not great........2000-07-20

I usually love reading books written pre-20th Century, as this one was (1796) but I didn't really enjoy this one as much as I expected. Even though it caused a mild scandal when first published, it is (naturally) rather tame by today's standards. The heroine's great crime is to declare her love for a man before he declares his. How shocking!

The book is written as a series of letters to her beloved's son telling him about her great crime, in order to save him from making the same mistakes. I did admire the way she examined and analyzed her feelings, and how she could stand back and see how her actions didn't always coincide with her intentions. She just loved this guy passionately and she couldn't talk herself out of it, no matter how hard she tried. It got to be rather tedious though, after a while, and I wished she could just get over it and get on with her life.

All the melodrama in the book comes in the last thirty pages, which is such a contrast to the mild, slow-paced rest of the book. It seemed very foreign to the first part, like the author felt she ought to throw in some action at long last. All in all, it was okay, but not great.

Old Myddelton's money: A novel (Library of select novels)
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Old Myddelton's money: A novel (Library of select novels)
Mary Cecil Hay
Manufacturer: Harper & Brothers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B00087T0A6

The Jazz Man
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The Jazz Man
Mary Hays, Illustrated by Grifalconi, Ann Weik
Manufacturer: New York: Atheneum, 1968
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NV9OMG

The house at Cherry hill,
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The house at Cherry hill,
Mary Hays Weik
Manufacturer: A.A. Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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DIANNE DE POYTIERS: LA GRANDE SENESCHALE DE NORMANDIE DUCHESSE DE VALENTINOIS.
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DIANNE DE POYTIERS: LA GRANDE SENESCHALE DE NORMANDIE DUCHESSE DE VALENTINOIS.
Mary. Hay
Manufacturer: Bumpus
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HGSMI4

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