Walker’s interest in feminist historical recovery crystallized during a required Novel course at Barnard College when she was an undergraduate. In the course,Walker read George Eliot novel Middlemarch (1871),where she found Eliot’s portrayal of Tertius Lygate’s scientific “intellectual passion”to describe her interest in documenting women as missing historical figures. Walker also read F. R. Leavis’s literary criticism, The Great Tradition (1948),in which he credited Jane Austen as the sole precursor to George Eliot’s work. Given her interest in the “epistemological authority of women as historical subjects,”Walker was hesitant to believe Leavis’s reductionist claim. [8]
Mary Hays
After researching the available material on Mary Hays in the Pforzheimer Library,Walker received a grant from the Pforzheimer to meet with the owner of Hays’s private correspondence in London. The owner was reluctant to share them because she understood Hays as a controversial feminist figure during her lifetime who wrote about illicit passion and “even suicide!”Her writing was criticized for questioning the inequality of the sexes,and she was personally attacked for pursuing knowledge (historically,a male occupation) and being homely. In 1800,Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to her as “a Thing,ugly and petticoated.” [11]
Eventually,the owner of the letters allowed Walker to view the 115 private letters to and from Hays in correspondence with Mary Wollstonecraft,William Godwin,Mary Shelley,Robert Southey,Eliza Fenwick and others. In her 2018 essay "I Sought &Made to Myself an Extraordinary Destiny," Walker describes the relationship between a female scholar and her subject. Amid contemporaneous “textual sabotage”that depicted Hays as unpleasant and sexually immoral,Walker recounts the journey to redefine Hays’s legacy through her revolutionary accomplishments. Walker’s experience with Hays was complicated:
"While I wanted to understand,empathize with,and defend Hays,her authorial self was so unlike the wise,steady persona presented by Austen’s narrators that had inspired me,that I,too,could not warm to her. She was angry,self-pitying,narcissistic,filled with resentment and yearning. Her unquiet spirit struggled against the tide of responses to her as unlovely,abrasive,and unlovable,confirmation that no respectable man would want her. Studying Hays seemed to take me further away from the apparently safe,hallowed shores of the Canon. I felt adrift;as an uncredentialled female autodidactic,Hays offered no safety." [8]
In 1972,Walker earned a doctorate for her work on Mary Hays,for which she received NYU’s highest academic honor,The Founder’s Day Award. Hays' biographies of historical women struck Walker;she wondered why Hays undertook them,departing from her earlier philosophical work. Hays had been a close friend of the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft,author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman . When Wollstonecraft died from complications of childbirth in 1797,Hays mourned her death by compiling biographies of 302 iconoclastic women. It was one of the earliest instances of feminist historical recovery.
Hays wrote to channel her pain and fortify herself by documenting the struggles and accomplishments of great female thinkers of the past. It was one of the earliest instances of feminist historical recovery. Hays wrote an Obituary of Wollstonecraft,unsigned (Letter to the Editor,Monthly Magazine 4 [September 1797],232-33). “Quick to feel,and indignant to resist the iron hand of despotism,whether civil or intellectual,her exertions to awaken in the minds of her oppressed sex a sense of their degradation,and to restore them to the dignity of reason and virtue,were active and incessant:by her impassioned reasoning and glowing eloquence,the fabric of voluptuous prejudice has been shaken to its foundation,and totters towards its fall:while her philosophic mind,taking a wider range,perceived and lamented in the defects of civil institutions,interwoven in their texture,and inseparable from them,the causes of those partial evils,destructive to virtue and happiness,which poison social intercourse and deform domestic life.” [12]
Hays’s instinct to document the lives of neglected historical women inspired the trajectory of Walker's career. [9]
Walker has written and edited numerous books and articles regarding Mary Hays,including The Idea of Being Free:A Mary Hays’s Reader (as editor,Broadview Press,2006),Mary Hays:The Growth of a Woman's Mind (Ashgate,2006,reissued by Routledge in 2018),The Chawton House Library Edition of Mary Hays’s Female Biography;or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women,of All Ages and Countries,6 vols. (as editor,Pickering &Chatto,2013,2014),and Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’:Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism (with Mary Spongberg,Routledge,2019).
