SOURCE: Hoagwood, Terence Allan. Introduction to The Victim of Prejudice, by Mary Hays, pp. 3-12. Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1990.

In the following essay, Hoagwood discusses the connections between Hays's polemical writings and her novel The Victim of Prejudice.

Mary Hays's The Victim of Prejudice (1799) is an important feminist novel, intellectually and aesthetically. Its author was a prominent figure among British writers who, during the period of the French Revolution and afterward, advocated feminist and politically radical forms of thought. A friend of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Joseph Priestley, and many others in the radical circles working in London in the 1790s, Hays wrote polemical literature as well as fiction, contributing to the periodical press and writing novels, biographies, and works of political and philosophical argument. The Victim of Prejudice, her second novel, is the most advanced and intellectually important fiction that she ever wrote. This novel has...