Writing Female Biography: Mary Hays and the Life Writing of Religious Dissent

Women's Life Writing in the Long 18th Century: A Critical Survey

“…Histories are no longer dominated by early Quaker women's autobiographies or published conversion narratives but rather address the diffuse and diverse forms of women's religious self‐expression from within a variety of denominations. My own analysis of the manuscripts of Methodist preachers suggests that these works might inform our understanding of women's spiritual friendships, intergenerational connections, textual sociability and religious histories, while Felicity James' reading of women's life writing against the backdrop of Rational Dissent highlights the ‘importance of religious identity in the formation of biography’ (119).…”

“…The most notable examples are Mary Hays' Female Biography () written ‘for the benefit, of my own sex’ in order ‘to excite a worthier emulation’ (1: v–vi), and Matilda Betham's A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (), comprising biographies of women ‘distinguished by their actions or talents, in various nations, or at different periods of the world’ (v). The radical potential of arranging women's lives alphabetically has been noted, as ‘Mistresses, novelists, queens, Revolutionaries, Roman matrons, courtesans, intellectuals and Dissenters all take their place […] rubbing up against one another in a fertile cross‐period jumble’ (James 117). The notable absence of Wollstonecraft in Female Biography , once read as symptomatic of a decline in Hays' radicalism, has been rethought.…”