This article proposes that Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney carves out a unique role for the novel form to play in philosophical debates about the emotions. By insisting on the necessity for imaginative writing that embraces the particular and the real, Hays brings passions to center stage. She exploits the potential for first-person narrative to rehabilitate the subjective, feeling component that falls out of accounts of emotions offered by non-fictional philosophy. Her aim is not to deny the importance of discussions about the emotions conducted at an abstract level, inducing the particular from the general. Rather, she aims to register discomfort with the artificiality of the perspective this mode produces if it is not tempered by analysis that approaches the same questions in reverse, inducing the general from the particular. Forcefully defending the intellectual legitimacy of her approach, she justifies her sustained exploration of particular, supposedly realistic emotions via their representation in novel form by asserting the ways in which such an approach can furnish philosophical enquiry. By giving herself the title of "philosopher," even though her medium is fiction, she offers up her novel not as an alternative to, but as a kind of, philosophical writing.In 1796, Mary Hays was grappling with the problem of how to square the theories of affectivity she had developed through her early non-fictional works with the affective turbulence she was encountering in her own life. The uncomfortable discrepancy between the two fuelled her frustration with philosophical analysis that takes as its object of enquiry emotions (which, according to Antonio Damasio, "are outwardly directed and public") and ignores, even denies, the significance of feelings ("which are inwardly directed and private") (36). In an attempt to find a way of writing about emotions that departs from the objectivising tendency of Enlightenment philosophy, Hays switched genre: she abandoned the polemical essay and embraced instead the novel form. Like William Godwin, who turned to the novel (especially Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams [1794] and St. Leon: A Tale of Sixteenth Century [1799]) as a new platform on which to play out the battle between emotion and reason, Hays was inspired by the possibilities offered by fiction for the exploration of the disjunction between emotions as they are seen from the outside, and feelings as they are felt from the inside. Capitalizing on the angles that the novel can reach through manipulation of point of view, Hays used fiction to rehabilitate the subjective component that falls out of accounts of emotions offered by non-fictional philosophy. Novelistic realism, she discovered, especially the realism achieved through firstperson narrative, can expose as unattainable, and consequently fallacious, the *