SOURCE: Ty, Eleanor. “Breaking the ‘Magic Circle’: From Repression to Effusion in Memoirs of Emma Courtney,” and “The Mother and Daughter: The Dangers of Replication in The Victim of Prejudice.” In Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s, pp. 46-72. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Ty discusses Memoirs of Emma Courtney, suggesting that the novel's true thesis, despite Hays's stated intentions to the contrary, is to demonstrate the fatal consequences of female repression. Ty further examines Hays's The Victim of Prejudice and claims that it is far more pessimistic than Emma Courtney, and that it may represent the author's rewriting of Richardson's Clarissa from a female perspective.

In the preface to her first novel Mary Hays contends that ‘the most interesting, and the most useful fictions’ are those that delineate ‘the progress’ and trace ‘the consequences of one strong, indulged passion or prejudice...