First published in 1796, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Hays work has become part of the radical intellectual ouevre of the 1790s.

Written largely in letters and retrospective confession, it follows Emma’s obsessive attachment to the elusive Augustus Harley, but the conventional machinery of romantic disappointment becomes an argument about female desire, reason, education, dependence. It's one of the earliest novels exploring what happens when a woman insists on treating her own emotional and intellectual life as seriously as men are permitted to treat theirs.

Hays belonged to the circle around Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and the novel is closely entangled with contemporary debates about rationalism, marriage and women’s social position. It is also strikingly autobiographical: Emma’s pursuit of Harley draws upon Hays’s own relationship with the Cambridge mathematician William Frend. That proximity gave the novel some of its notoriety, but also its force. Emma is frequently excessive, contradictory, demanding and embarrassingly alive; Hays refuses the easier eighteenth-century solution of making female desire virtuous by making it discreet.

A fascinating bridge between radical Enlightenment feminism, the sentimental novel and the emerging psychological novel.

Pandora Press / Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987. Paperback. Introduction by Sally Cline. ISBN 0-86358-132-3. Originally published in two volumes by G. G. and J. Robinson, London, 1796. Light shelf wear and handling marks to covers, with minor edge wear and some age-toning to pages. Binding sound and internally clean. Good to very good condition.