Memoirs of Emma Courtney

In 1796, Mary Hays detonated a small scandal with this epistolary novel, a raw account of a woman who refuses to wait passively for love. Emma Courtney writes directly to her beloved Francis, laying bare her intellect, her desires, and her fury at the double standard that permits men passion while condemning women for the same. Raised by an aunt after losing her mother and being abandoned by her father, Emma has internalised Rousseau's philosophies about rational beings and finds them radically at odds with how society treats half of humanity. She argues, she pursues, she refuses to perform the meekness expected of her. The novel is partly autobiographical: Hays herself loved William Frend, a man who did not love her back, and she channelled that wound into something politically explosive. What scandalised contemporary moralists was not merely Emma's forwardness but her assertion that a woman's erotic and intellectual life belonged to her. The ending some found implausible, but the argument itself remains urgent: why should women's desires be treated as sins?