Mary Hays

Mary Hays was an English novelist, essayist, and feminist writer associated with the radical intellectual circles of the 1790s. Her works include *Memoirs of Emma Courtney* (1796), *The Victim of Prejudice* (1799), and the six-volume *Female Biography* (1803), an ambitious collection of women’s lives. Through fiction, political essays, and biography, Hays argued for women’s education, independence, and intellectual equality.