The Victim of Prejudice

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Many consider Mary Hays to be a clear forebear of Austen, with good reason: The Victim of Prejudice, like nearly all major Austen works, focuses on a woman’s need to marry in order to support herself. Mary, the novel’s “victim”, refuses to marry her rapist despite expectations. Hays criticizes dominant, male institutions that fail the character Mary along the way, such as courts that favor wealthy men. The novel directly takes on and subverts the “fallen woman” trope, in which a woman in a situation like Mary’s loses her will and ends up destroyed and dead. The Victim of Prejudice is Hays’ most explicitly feminist work, but her revolutionary beliefs did not stop there. Close friends with Mary Wollstonecraft, Hays was a radical in her own right, rejecting the teachings of the Church of England (illegal in her time) and living independently as a single woman.

Lehigh University Catalog Record: https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/Record/435136

Mary Hays (1759-1843)
The Victim of Prejudice
Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1994