A close friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, feminist, philosopher, biographer, historian, literary critic, novelist, and educational writer Mary Hays was among the most radical of British women writers during the 1790s. Mary Hays's early education reflected the views of her parents, rational dissenters John and Elizabeth Hays, and was heavily informed by debates at the Dissenting meeting house. Her career as an intellectual began with her publication of Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship: Inscribed to Gilbert Wakefield (1791), a defense of nonconformist religious practices, which she published under the pseudonym Eusebia. Next followed a collection for the improvement of young women, Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793), a collaborative work with her sister Elizabeth. Hays published two major novels, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), drawn substantially from autobiography, and The Victim of Prejudice (1799), and three lesser novels, Harry Clinton (1804), The Brothers; or, Consequences (1815), and Family Annals; or, The Sisters (1817). Her anonymously published Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798) is her most important feminist statement, but her views on the condition of women are evident in much of her work, including her novels and her biographical series such as Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries (1803) and Memoirs of Queens (1821). Hays was brought in to complete History of England, from the Earliest Records, to the Peace of Amiens: In a Series of Letters to a Young Lady at School (1806), which Charlotte Smith had begun but become too ill to continue. Hays contributed at least some novel reviews to the Analytical Review while Mary Wollstonecraft was a regular contributor, and it is believed she may have edited the novels section of the periodical for a few months as well. Hays met Wollstonecraft through a London circle of radical and dissenting intellectuals, and the two became fast friends. After Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, Hays became the primary target of antifeminist attacks in the press during a period of regressive attitudes. Hays never married, and with limited income and only moderate acclaim for her work, the last 20 years of her life were difficult. Following her death, Hays's work received little academic or critical attention until the feminist movement of the twentieth century.