SOURCE: Ty, Eleanor. “The Imprisoned Female Body in Mary Hays's The Victim of Prejudice.” In Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, edited by Linda Lang-Peralta, pp. 133-53. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Ty discusses The Victim of Prejudice, claiming that Hays's concern in this novel was the construction of female subjectivity according to the hierarchies associated with class and gender.

In her Advertisement to the Reader, Mary Hays states that what she wants to question in The Victim of Prejudice (1799) is the “too-great stress laid on the reputation for chastity in woman” and the “means … which are used to ensure it.”¹ This aim echoes that of Mary Wollstonecraft, who in The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), had also argued that “regard for reputation” was “the grand source of female depravity” because it causes women to adopt an “artificial mode of...