Mary Hays was an outspoken Radical intellectual in the turbulent decade of the 1790's. She argued vehemently for the need to recognise the moral and rational qualities of women, the necessity of a better system of education for girls, and the importance of giving women without fortunes a career without 'servitude in prostitution.' The Victim of Prejudice—Hays' second novel, first published in 1799—is a powerful indictment of man-made institutions such as the courts and legislative systems which favour persons of wealth and rank. In the novel the metaphor of women's confinement becomes real as the heroine's worst nightmares, her horrors and sense of helplessness become a physical reality. The Victim of Prejudice is of great interest for its strong feminist content, and it is both powerful and moving as a literary work; this edition makes this important late eighteenth-century text again available to a wide readership. Appendices of the new edition include excerpts from Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, Edward Moore, contemporary reviews, Hays' essays and letters.
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"Mary Hays' passionate tale of a girl who is raped but refuses to marry her seducer offers a powerful alternative to Victorian constructions of the 'fallen woman'. This early feminist novel, here judiciously edited by Eleanor Ty, should be read by anyone interested in the literary history of the sexualized female, in women's studies, or in British Romantic Literature." (Anne K. Mellor )
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The Broadview Literary Texts series is an effort to represent the ever-changing canon of literature in English by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valuable, though lesser-known literature.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
More on the Wrongs of Woman in the 18th century,
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This review is from: The Victim of Prejudice. (Paperback)
Mary Hays's "The Victim of Prejudice" is the story of Mary Raymond, a young woman, who, from birth, seems destined to suffer. The 'prejudice' of the title consists of unfair societal standards that exclude all but the wealthy, well-born, and influential. Mary is raised by her guardian, Mr. Raymond, on a small estate in the country, where he teaches her far more than any woman of her class and birth is expected to know by society.From her youth, Mary is tormented and pursued by Sir Peter Osborne - a depraved example of the type of man Raymond warns Mary about that are out in the world. At Raymond's death, Mary is thrown out into that world to fend for herself, and the virtues and knowledge taught her by her guardian are all put to the test. Like Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel "Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman," Hays short novel is a work meant to display feminist indignation at the treatment of women in the late 18th century. Also like Wollstonecraft, Hays appropriates some of the motifs of gothic fiction to underscore the extreme evils that men, law, and society are allowed to perpetrate against women. "The Victim of Prejudice" can tend toward melodrama, but is an important text of early British feminism and illustrates the domestic and personal concerns of the female Romantics.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
she's okay until she tangles with Burke,
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This review is from: The Victim of Prejudice. (Paperback)
Mary Hays, an early British feminist writers, was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and William Blake, and like them she was excited by the French Revolution and the prospect of toppling the privileged classes. Of course, at that time all men were comparatively privileged, at least as compared to women. In The Victim of Prejudice she mounts a twin attack on the lowly status of women within society and on the exalted status of the landed gentry, who still dominated life in that pre-industrial age. The former attack is fairly successful, the latter is not.Mary Raymond, the heroine of the novel, is orphaned at an early age, but is raised and well-educated (perhaps too well for the time) by her guardian, Mr. Raymond. Two brothers, sons of the Honorable Mr. Pelham, come to Mr. Raymond's for instruction too, and Mary falls in love with William Pelham, and he with her. But Mary is an unacceptable match for such a wealthy youth, more unacceptable than she realizes until Mr. Raymond reluctantly reveals the sordid circumstances of her birth, and so the young lovers are separated. Meanwhile, Sir Peter Osborne, the brutal local landowner, has taken a fancy to Mary and is reluctant to accept her protestations of his advances. In a symbol laden early scene, William coaxes the teenage Mary into stealing some "forbidden fruit" from Osborne's vineyard. But he catches her and expels her from the garden, calling her "a true daughter of Eve." In the ensuing years they have several more equally unfortunate encounters, with Osborne becoming ever more determined to have her. Finally, after the death of Mr. Raymond, who had tried to get her to accept a more appropriate marriage offer to no avail, has left Mary particularly vulnerable, with no money and nowhere to go, Osborne kidnaps and rapes her. At this point William returns to the scene and finds Mary wandering, broken and ill. Though by now married to another, he nurses her back to health. But when he proposes that she become his mistress, the outraged Mary refuses and flees. She tries to find employment several places but finds that her reputation as a fallen woman, resulting not merely from the incident with Osborne but from her time with the married William, follows her, causing scandal and encouraging other men to be forward with her. Throughout these various travails, she remains admirably loyal to the moral upbringing which Mr. Raymond provided : 'Let it come then!' exclaimed I with fervour; 'Let my ruin be complete! Disgrace, indigence, contempt, while unmerited, I dare encounter, but not the censure of my own heart. Dishonour, death itself, is a calamity less insupportable than self-reproach. Amidst the destruction of my hopes, the wreck of my fortunes, of my fame, my spirit still triumphs in conscious rectitude; nor would I, intolerable as is the sense of my wrongs and of my griefs, exchange them for all that guilty prosperity could bestow.' but is quite annoyingly passive in the face of these injustices : I revolved in my mind, selected, and rejected, as new obstacles occurred to me, a variety of plans. Difficulties almost insuperable, difficulties peculiar to my sex, my age, and my unfortunate situation, opposed themselves to my efforts on every side. I sought only the bare means of subsistence: amidst the luxuriant and the opulent, who surrounded me, I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist! Somehow this ambition--mere existence-- just seems inadequate. More appropriate, particularly as long as her life is ruined anyway, would be to wreak a horrific vengeance on the reprehensible Lord Peter. But as the rather unfortunate title of the book indicates, this is a story about unrelenting victimization. And because Mary never really seeks to do more than exist, never even seeks redress against Osborne, she somehow makes herself a participant in her own victimization. A system which would punish the victim rather than the rapist is so obviously unjust, that the purely feminist angle of the story does work to a degree. However, Osborne is so awful that it is hard to accept him as a genuinely representative figure of the British aristocracy. Eleanor Ty, editor of the Broadview Text edition of the book, suggests in her introduction that the character Osborne is intended as a specific rebuke to Edmund Burke and his conservative views on the value of ancient institutions like the aristocracy. Though I'm a fan of Burke, there are coherent arguments to be made in opposition to his theories : this is not one. The book works well enough as a kind of Gothic thriller, and is adequate as a protofeminist tract, but it fails as a radical polemic against the prevailing institutions of the time. The existence of one evil fictional nobleman doesn't serve to turn 18th Century Britain into a den of horrors. GRADE : C+
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