The Idea of Being Free
A Mary Hays Reader
Mary Hays author Gina Luria Walker editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Broadview Press Ltd
Published:30th Dec '05
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Mary Hays (1759-1843) is often best remembered for her early revolutionary novels The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. In this collection, however, Gina Luria Walker reveals the extraordinary range of Hays’s oeuvre. The selections are mainly from Hays’s non-fiction writings, including letters, life-writing, political commentary, and essays. The extracts demonstrate her importance as an advanced and innovative thinker, philosophical commentator, and writer of deliberately experimental fiction.
This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and full annotation. Texts by numerous other writers are interleaved chronologically with Hays’s writings to illustrate her idiosyncratic intellectual genealogy, how her understanding modulated over time, and the multiple ways in which she influenced and was influenced by the most significant issues and figures of her age.
“Over the past 10 years or so, the work of Mary Hays has become increasingly familiar to those studying the literature of the French Revolutionary period. Interest has focused mainly on her two experimental 1790s novels, however, while her equally important philosophical and biographical writings remain less well known and are difficult to access. Gina Luria Walker’s The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader will thus be invaluable—not just in bringing Hays’s non-fictional publications to a wider readership, but in the way it makes the most of the excellent Broadview Editions format, providing a rich selection from other contemporary texts in order to set Hays’s work in its intellectual context.” — Vivien Jones, University of Leeds
ISBN: 9781551115597
Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 16mm
Weight: 404g
343 pages