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Memoirs of Emma Courtney
First published in the turbulent decade following the French Revolution, Memoirs of Emma Courtney is based on Mary Hays' own passionate struggle with romance and Enlightenment philosophy. A feminist and ardent disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft, Hays reveals the lamentable gap between `what women are' and `what woment ought to be'.
The novel is one of the most articulate and detailed expressions of the yearnings and frustrations of a woman living in late eighteenth-century English society. It questions marital arrangements and courtship rituals by depicting a woman who actively pursues the man she loves. The novel explores the links between sexuality, desire, and economic and social freedom, suggesting the need for improvement in the laws of society which `have enslaved, enervated, and degraded woman'.
About the For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
The novel is one of the most articulate and detailed expressions of the yearnings and frustrations of a woman living in late eighteenth-century English society. It questions marital arrangements and courtship rituals by depicting a woman who actively pursues the man she loves. The novel explores the links between sexuality, desire, and economic and social freedom, suggesting the need for improvement in the laws of society which `have enslaved, enervated, and degraded woman'.
About the For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1796
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
April 1, 2020
Imagine writing getting rejected by a bloke and deciding the best way to deal with it is to write a fictionalised version of your life, include your actual love letters, and then kill off his character to-boot. Truly the most Extra book in existence, what a flex.
November 15, 2019
Dear Emma Courtney,
I recently completed your story over the course of a few days for my English assignment. Needless to say, I was not impressed by it. I can forgive the meandering beginning, the lack of a genuine plotline for most of your tale and just how boring it all was if not for one thing: You are now part of the holy trinity of worst female protagonists of all time, along with a Miss Anastasia Steele and Miss Clary Fray.
Keep in mind, I do not loathe you because of your circumstances: I understand that your time period was one that was most unkind to women. My disdain for you also does not stem from anger, as does my hatred for Miss Fray. Rather, I find it rather melodramatic that you seem to burst into tears at every opportunity. I have long lost track of the times where you would cry, weep, blubber, sob, wail, etc. While I completely sympathise with your woes and sorrows, please note that this does get rather repetitive upon your tenth crying.
Your Ensemble of side-characters are completely forgettable: With so many house changes, it is hard to tell who is staying and should be the centre of our attention, and who is going to leave, never to be seen again. while I understand that young ladies of your calibre require a large group of friends to converse with, quantity is not equal to quality.
In short, your plot was thin, your characters forgettable and you yourself were rather irritating.
Yours Sincerely, Jack Rawlinson.
PS: Stop crying. Please.
I recently completed your story over the course of a few days for my English assignment. Needless to say, I was not impressed by it. I can forgive the meandering beginning, the lack of a genuine plotline for most of your tale and just how boring it all was if not for one thing: You are now part of the holy trinity of worst female protagonists of all time, along with a Miss Anastasia Steele and Miss Clary Fray.
Keep in mind, I do not loathe you because of your circumstances: I understand that your time period was one that was most unkind to women. My disdain for you also does not stem from anger, as does my hatred for Miss Fray. Rather, I find it rather melodramatic that you seem to burst into tears at every opportunity. I have long lost track of the times where you would cry, weep, blubber, sob, wail, etc. While I completely sympathise with your woes and sorrows, please note that this does get rather repetitive upon your tenth crying.
Your Ensemble of side-characters are completely forgettable: With so many house changes, it is hard to tell who is staying and should be the centre of our attention, and who is going to leave, never to be seen again. while I understand that young ladies of your calibre require a large group of friends to converse with, quantity is not equal to quality.
In short, your plot was thin, your characters forgettable and you yourself were rather irritating.
Yours Sincerely, Jack Rawlinson.
PS: Stop crying. Please.
March 25, 2021
Memoirs of Emma Courtney is one of those books where the story around the novel is as interesting (or in this case, more interesting) than the novel itself.
Mary Hays was an interesting person, born in Southwark to a dissenting family, not far from where a young Mary Wollstonecraft has also lived. She had to fight her family to allow her to marry the man of her choice and right when she convinced them to finally let them marry, he died. She became friend with a group of radicals, including William Godwin, who would be her mentor. Writing a selection of essays, she attracted the admiration of mathematician William Frend who she completely fell for. She wrote him a number of love letters but her love was unrequited. Filled with emotion, with nowhere to release it, William Godwin recommended she used her letters as the basis of fiction as a means to work through her feelings and produce something interesting. Memoirs of Emma Courtney is that novel.
The novel is framed as letters from Emma Courtney to Augustus Harley, a young man who has been pestering her for some details from her life. The retelling begins interestingly if a little conventionally. She was born in a loveless marriage where her mother died shortly after. He father being too invested in his playboy lifestyle, she is shipped off to her auntie and uncle. (They are incidentally called Melmoth, which made me smile considering the later 1820 work.) There is is loved and loves in return, she shows a prodigious love of play and stories which develops into a love of reading. In her grief when her uncle dies, she claims to read 10-14 novels a week. She claims that her happy childhood and devotion to her aunt and uncle taught her “that lively propensity to attachment, to which I have through my life been a martyr.” Her aunt sees this and, on her deathbed, gives a lengthy warning for Emma to keep her emotions in greater check. A warning so lengthy and so verbose it comes off as comic. This is an accident, there is nothing in the slightest bit playful or funny in this book.
The point of all this, other than to pad out the text, is to show the education Emma receives in childhood. It seems, from the amount of times she quotes him, that Mary Hays was a huge fan of a French philosopher called Claude Adrien Helvétius. He took ideas from Locke and expanded them. If people are blanks slates in which sense impressions from consciousness and intelligence, then all humans (male and female) are born with equal potential which is shaped and limited by childhood experiences. This also linked very well with Wollstonecraft’s writing about how women were intentionally stunted, physically, mentally and spiritually by their education and it was through learning that women could learn to develop into rational equally able to participate with men.
It’s important to Emma Courtney, that she had a different upbringing than many women and unlike them had a chance to develop skills of rational argument and logic, something which greatly informs how she behaves in the rest of the book.
After the death of her uncle, aunt and father, she goes to live with another uncle. They keep table with Mr Francis, our William Godwin stand-in and Mr Montague, a flighty young man who alternately flirts with her and her two cousins. She also strikes up a friendship with Mrs Harley, a widow who talks repeatedly about her wonderful son. Emma falls in love with these stories and the picture of him kept in the woman’s house.
In a rare exciting scene in the novel, she is summoned by Mrs Harley who is sick. Mr Montague accompanies her out of gallantry and they rush off in a carriage that bumps into a figure on the road and starts to teeter. Mr Montague leaps out the carriage to save his own skin and is run over by a back wheel, then the whole thing overturns. Emma is okay and takes off the man who was bumped to nurse him back to health. Of course he is Mrs Harley’s perfect son, Augustus. As he heals she spends time with him and he teaches her, she falls even more in love but although he is kind and seems to love her, he just won’t commit.
This is where the real love letters come into play. It’s interesting that in the novel, Harley has a very good reason he can’t commit to her (and a deathbed confession of love). In reality, the recipient just wasn’t that into her and it’s easy to see why.
The first letter is excusable, it’s a gushing declaration of love that details all the ways in which she thinks he is wonderful and offering her complete devotion in return. I am certainly guilty of sending such an embarrassing letter to someone who didn’t reciprocate and was probably turned off. What I didn’t do, was follow it up with a series of increasingly long, dull and bludgeoning series of letters, which is exactly what Emma Courtney does and Mary Hays did.
If these really are versions of love letters she sent, then they are the most astonishingly wrong-headed, passion-killing love letters of all time. They veer between the oddly boastful (“I would give myself to you - the gift is not worthless.”) to the knuckle-gnawingly pedantic. The worst example is one where she lists the four main reasons he may not want to enter into a relationship with her and uses facts and logic to take apart those reasons. I can see her angle, to show that she’s not like other girls, that she can wield a logical argument but it is so leaden, so dull, there’s no twinkling of fun or pleasure. I’m not saying women should pretend to be bimbos to win men, only that even in the eighteenth century (or especially in, if you’ve read much around it) there’s an element of romantic intercourse in which both parties try and please the other. The love letters are ultimate passion killers.
They are also book killers, any momentum is ground to a halt for a hundred pages and the parts linking her letters only talk of depressive lethargy. She’s very good at the details, talking about how she moved “restless and dissatisfied, from seat to seat.”
After a long period of depression and empty philosophising, she finds out the reason he can’t respond. Then the plot kicks into high gear; in 30 pages she becomes bankrupt, marries a second best and has an uneasy marriage as a result, is cheated on, there’s also infanticide and suicide - then the book ends. Had the love letters been omitted and this material been explored, it could have been a really interesting, dark novel but they weren’t and it isn’t.
In some ways the book is like an earlier By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept but if the passions of that book been funnelled through a university logic class. It’s turgid and awkward and really only interesting for how it was written than what was written.
As a complete aside, this is possibly the third Oxford World’s Classics edition of a novel I’ve read recently that seems a little sloppy in the editing. In this case, the text seems to have been (digitally?) converted from an older print copy and on three occasions the long ’s’ has been converted into an ‘f’. This means at a critical point at the novel, a character lets out ‘convulsive fobs’.
Mary Hays was an interesting person, born in Southwark to a dissenting family, not far from where a young Mary Wollstonecraft has also lived. She had to fight her family to allow her to marry the man of her choice and right when she convinced them to finally let them marry, he died. She became friend with a group of radicals, including William Godwin, who would be her mentor. Writing a selection of essays, she attracted the admiration of mathematician William Frend who she completely fell for. She wrote him a number of love letters but her love was unrequited. Filled with emotion, with nowhere to release it, William Godwin recommended she used her letters as the basis of fiction as a means to work through her feelings and produce something interesting. Memoirs of Emma Courtney is that novel.
The novel is framed as letters from Emma Courtney to Augustus Harley, a young man who has been pestering her for some details from her life. The retelling begins interestingly if a little conventionally. She was born in a loveless marriage where her mother died shortly after. He father being too invested in his playboy lifestyle, she is shipped off to her auntie and uncle. (They are incidentally called Melmoth, which made me smile considering the later 1820 work.) There is is loved and loves in return, she shows a prodigious love of play and stories which develops into a love of reading. In her grief when her uncle dies, she claims to read 10-14 novels a week. She claims that her happy childhood and devotion to her aunt and uncle taught her “that lively propensity to attachment, to which I have through my life been a martyr.” Her aunt sees this and, on her deathbed, gives a lengthy warning for Emma to keep her emotions in greater check. A warning so lengthy and so verbose it comes off as comic. This is an accident, there is nothing in the slightest bit playful or funny in this book.
The point of all this, other than to pad out the text, is to show the education Emma receives in childhood. It seems, from the amount of times she quotes him, that Mary Hays was a huge fan of a French philosopher called Claude Adrien Helvétius. He took ideas from Locke and expanded them. If people are blanks slates in which sense impressions from consciousness and intelligence, then all humans (male and female) are born with equal potential which is shaped and limited by childhood experiences. This also linked very well with Wollstonecraft’s writing about how women were intentionally stunted, physically, mentally and spiritually by their education and it was through learning that women could learn to develop into rational equally able to participate with men.
It’s important to Emma Courtney, that she had a different upbringing than many women and unlike them had a chance to develop skills of rational argument and logic, something which greatly informs how she behaves in the rest of the book.
After the death of her uncle, aunt and father, she goes to live with another uncle. They keep table with Mr Francis, our William Godwin stand-in and Mr Montague, a flighty young man who alternately flirts with her and her two cousins. She also strikes up a friendship with Mrs Harley, a widow who talks repeatedly about her wonderful son. Emma falls in love with these stories and the picture of him kept in the woman’s house.
In a rare exciting scene in the novel, she is summoned by Mrs Harley who is sick. Mr Montague accompanies her out of gallantry and they rush off in a carriage that bumps into a figure on the road and starts to teeter. Mr Montague leaps out the carriage to save his own skin and is run over by a back wheel, then the whole thing overturns. Emma is okay and takes off the man who was bumped to nurse him back to health. Of course he is Mrs Harley’s perfect son, Augustus. As he heals she spends time with him and he teaches her, she falls even more in love but although he is kind and seems to love her, he just won’t commit.
This is where the real love letters come into play. It’s interesting that in the novel, Harley has a very good reason he can’t commit to her (and a deathbed confession of love). In reality, the recipient just wasn’t that into her and it’s easy to see why.
The first letter is excusable, it’s a gushing declaration of love that details all the ways in which she thinks he is wonderful and offering her complete devotion in return. I am certainly guilty of sending such an embarrassing letter to someone who didn’t reciprocate and was probably turned off. What I didn’t do, was follow it up with a series of increasingly long, dull and bludgeoning series of letters, which is exactly what Emma Courtney does and Mary Hays did.
If these really are versions of love letters she sent, then they are the most astonishingly wrong-headed, passion-killing love letters of all time. They veer between the oddly boastful (“I would give myself to you - the gift is not worthless.”) to the knuckle-gnawingly pedantic. The worst example is one where she lists the four main reasons he may not want to enter into a relationship with her and uses facts and logic to take apart those reasons. I can see her angle, to show that she’s not like other girls, that she can wield a logical argument but it is so leaden, so dull, there’s no twinkling of fun or pleasure. I’m not saying women should pretend to be bimbos to win men, only that even in the eighteenth century (or especially in, if you’ve read much around it) there’s an element of romantic intercourse in which both parties try and please the other. The love letters are ultimate passion killers.
They are also book killers, any momentum is ground to a halt for a hundred pages and the parts linking her letters only talk of depressive lethargy. She’s very good at the details, talking about how she moved “restless and dissatisfied, from seat to seat.”
After a long period of depression and empty philosophising, she finds out the reason he can’t respond. Then the plot kicks into high gear; in 30 pages she becomes bankrupt, marries a second best and has an uneasy marriage as a result, is cheated on, there’s also infanticide and suicide - then the book ends. Had the love letters been omitted and this material been explored, it could have been a really interesting, dark novel but they weren’t and it isn’t.
In some ways the book is like an earlier By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept but if the passions of that book been funnelled through a university logic class. It’s turgid and awkward and really only interesting for how it was written than what was written.
As a complete aside, this is possibly the third Oxford World’s Classics edition of a novel I’ve read recently that seems a little sloppy in the editing. In this case, the text seems to have been (digitally?) converted from an older print copy and on three occasions the long ’s’ has been converted into an ‘f’. This means at a critical point at the novel, a character lets out ‘convulsive fobs’.
September 16, 2019
Longer review to come later, after I have gone through my highlights, which there were many. I'm absolutely stealing "wand of truth" to use as a euphemism though. And thanks to AAVE the phrase "thirst for knowledge" perfectly describes youthful Emma's character. So thirsty, omg.
16/9/19 ETA longer review, with 200+ years old spoilers so, be warned.
Reasons why Emma Courtney is basically a millennial:
- brought up being told to get an education, but her boomer parents left her no cash, and also student loans haven't been invented yet
- doesn't think she'll ever get married, isn't interested in getting married, also can't afford to live alone, fml
- she can't get a job! There are no jobs. Also, like, waged labour is exploitative and demeaning
- because she can't afford rent, she's essentially couch-surfing
- falls in love with a dude after seeing his picture somewhere
- dude doesn't reply to her suggestions they should date, but also refuses to tell her whether he has a gf already (spoiler: Augustus is a total gaslighting fuckboy)
- fuckboy ends up ghosting her, of course
- she ends up marrying Mr I Swiped Right On You So Why Didn't We Match On Tinder Already just to keep a roof over her head (despite swiping left on him several times already, who can be picky when you're up to your credit card limit and behind on rent lol)
- the marriage is a spectacular failure and Emma is left to raise two kids on her own!
In this light, most of the middle section of the book is just chat logs of Emma's unanswered texts to fuckboy Augustus, pleading with him to tell her if he's single and going on about how good they would be together, how much she respects his intellect and loves him for his command of reason and knowledge.
I have the start of a whole essay written comparing Emma Courtney with Sherry Thomas's Lady Sherlock/Charlotte Holmes, because honestly I could talk about this stuff for hours, but I'm going to wrap it up here and try not to think about rewriting Emma Courtney as an actual millennial alternate universe, and complete the triangle where Emma's victim of circumstance intersects with Charlotte Holmes understand of the sinister systemic workings of the patriarchy in maintaining the social order.
Also I should point out the book itself was not a gripping or easy read (love that dense, florid enlightenment prose!) But it has been a delight to stew on later. Also, and I cannot express this often or deeply enough: fuck the patriarchy.
16/9/19 ETA longer review, with 200+ years old spoilers so, be warned.
Reasons why Emma Courtney is basically a millennial:
- brought up being told to get an education, but her boomer parents left her no cash, and also student loans haven't been invented yet
- doesn't think she'll ever get married, isn't interested in getting married, also can't afford to live alone, fml
- she can't get a job! There are no jobs. Also, like, waged labour is exploitative and demeaning
- because she can't afford rent, she's essentially couch-surfing
- falls in love with a dude after seeing his picture somewhere
- dude doesn't reply to her suggestions they should date, but also refuses to tell her whether he has a gf already (spoiler: Augustus is a total gaslighting fuckboy)
- fuckboy ends up ghosting her, of course
- she ends up marrying Mr I Swiped Right On You So Why Didn't We Match On Tinder Already just to keep a roof over her head (despite swiping left on him several times already, who can be picky when you're up to your credit card limit and behind on rent lol)
- the marriage is a spectacular failure and Emma is left to raise two kids on her own!
In this light, most of the middle section of the book is just chat logs of Emma's unanswered texts to fuckboy Augustus, pleading with him to tell her if he's single and going on about how good they would be together, how much she respects his intellect and loves him for his command of reason and knowledge.
I have the start of a whole essay written comparing Emma Courtney with Sherry Thomas's Lady Sherlock/Charlotte Holmes, because honestly I could talk about this stuff for hours, but I'm going to wrap it up here and try not to think about rewriting Emma Courtney as an actual millennial alternate universe, and complete the triangle where Emma's victim of circumstance intersects with Charlotte Holmes understand of the sinister systemic workings of the patriarchy in maintaining the social order.
Also I should point out the book itself was not a gripping or easy read (love that dense, florid enlightenment prose!) But it has been a delight to stew on later. Also, and I cannot express this often or deeply enough: fuck the patriarchy.
September 28, 2025
3.5 / I very much appreciated the drama of this book but boy was it painful to read what felt like hundreds of letters from Emma trying to convince Augustus to marry her. Like I get it, he sounds great, but get a grip girl!
December 7, 2007
This book is in the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman and William Godwin's Things as they Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, but it's fascinating in its own right for a few reasons:
1. It's a deliberately experimental text that includes correspondence from Hays's own life.
2. It plumbs the previously unexplored depths of female psychology, including female desire and sexuality (which made it quite scandalous for the 1790s).
3. It was notoriously poorly received upon publication.
The plot can be frustrating at moments, but it's well worth the read.
1. It's a deliberately experimental text that includes correspondence from Hays's own life.
2. It plumbs the previously unexplored depths of female psychology, including female desire and sexuality (which made it quite scandalous for the 1790s).
3. It was notoriously poorly received upon publication.
The plot can be frustrating at moments, but it's well worth the read.
July 19, 2014
The plot doesn't progress at all throughout the middle 100 pages, and then ten million things happen right at the end.
Read
March 14, 2025Mess with a capital M
A devoted "disciple" of Mary Wollstonecraft and avid referee of Wollstonecraft's husband William
Godwin (especially his novel Caleb Williams),
Mary Hays confidently proclaimed herself to be a feminist, and her work here to be of feminist significance.
obviously I do believe in her to have these qualities, but at the same time, basically the only "feminist" theme I found to stand out significantly was an imagining of:
"what if women took romantic rejection as pathetically and defensively as a very specific and identifiable breed of man?"
The novel is heavily inspired by Hays' own tumultuous love life, and focuses primarily on dozens of letters our protagonist Emma (aka Hays) ceaselessly pens
to a man she really doesn't know well but is quite frankly obsessed with, but has repeatedly avoided or rebuffed her.
In her desperate pursuits of a lover that is not interested, she exhibits hasty and toxic love-bombing, selfish motives, passive aggressive insincerity, and overall portrays a deep proclivity for making everything about herself, - but I guess
you could say in that context that Hays definitely succeeds in giving her woman all of the qualities of a notably pathetic man, the kind of man to text you unceasingly after a first date when you say you "weren't feeling it", angrily accusing you of leading him on, of endless wrongdoings and typing degrading insults, that despite these dramatics possibly being benign, you still have to cringingly and a little fearfully block his number.
I think Hays' ability to basically create an entire novel based on portraying her own scornful and vengeful wish fulfillment inspired by her own slighted love, and as a transparent way to express strongly opinionated outlooks, is absolutely hilariously petty and inventive, but I will say the the repetition of letter after letter of desperate love lorn whinging and the cast of incredibly one dimensional exterior characters left me longing myself only for the end; an end which proved to be a very speedily executed unfortunate
course of events that I am very sure Hays had a very satisfying time writing.
safe to say, in conclusion, that if you have ever been exponentially down bad for someone, and admittedly embarrassed yourself in the process, maybe this book will somewhat make you feel better about your own questionable choices. or maybe Emma's melodramatic and offensive despair will give you traumatic flashbacks of a time you rejected someone and they didn't take it well.
I will say, it is always fun to be reminded that humans have always been writing books so bad that they were funny.
A devoted "disciple" of Mary Wollstonecraft and avid referee of Wollstonecraft's husband William
Godwin (especially his novel Caleb Williams),
Mary Hays confidently proclaimed herself to be a feminist, and her work here to be of feminist significance.
obviously I do believe in her to have these qualities, but at the same time, basically the only "feminist" theme I found to stand out significantly was an imagining of:
"what if women took romantic rejection as pathetically and defensively as a very specific and identifiable breed of man?"
The novel is heavily inspired by Hays' own tumultuous love life, and focuses primarily on dozens of letters our protagonist Emma (aka Hays) ceaselessly pens
to a man she really doesn't know well but is quite frankly obsessed with, but has repeatedly avoided or rebuffed her.
In her desperate pursuits of a lover that is not interested, she exhibits hasty and toxic love-bombing, selfish motives, passive aggressive insincerity, and overall portrays a deep proclivity for making everything about herself, - but I guess
you could say in that context that Hays definitely succeeds in giving her woman all of the qualities of a notably pathetic man, the kind of man to text you unceasingly after a first date when you say you "weren't feeling it", angrily accusing you of leading him on, of endless wrongdoings and typing degrading insults, that despite these dramatics possibly being benign, you still have to cringingly and a little fearfully block his number.
I think Hays' ability to basically create an entire novel based on portraying her own scornful and vengeful wish fulfillment inspired by her own slighted love, and as a transparent way to express strongly opinionated outlooks, is absolutely hilariously petty and inventive, but I will say the the repetition of letter after letter of desperate love lorn whinging and the cast of incredibly one dimensional exterior characters left me longing myself only for the end; an end which proved to be a very speedily executed unfortunate
course of events that I am very sure Hays had a very satisfying time writing.
safe to say, in conclusion, that if you have ever been exponentially down bad for someone, and admittedly embarrassed yourself in the process, maybe this book will somewhat make you feel better about your own questionable choices. or maybe Emma's melodramatic and offensive despair will give you traumatic flashbacks of a time you rejected someone and they didn't take it well.
I will say, it is always fun to be reminded that humans have always been writing books so bad that they were funny.
January 4, 2025
A good chunk of the book is Emma bugging the man she loves about whether he is attached to someone else.
March 8, 2013
Read for EN4363: Romantic Writing and Women.
I was confused by all the negative reviews when I began reading this book, but now as I come to a close, I can understand the complaints. This novel initially captivated me, and I was surprised to find some of the elements of Emma's life akin to those you'd come across in an Austen novel--a young woman passed between relatives due to deaths in her family, an unusual upbringing giving her a freedom to study typically unfeminine subjects, ultimately culminating in her being a bit too forward with a gentleman she has set her heart upon.
I have absolutely no objections to women being open about their feelings with a man they're interested in, and I could see in Emma a lot of who I was as a teenager--convinced I was madly in love with a boy who just wanted to be friends. However, I got frustrated with Emma's incessant chasing of Augustus after a while. I couldn't understand why she was still obsessed with a man who clearly did not care for her. It might sound a little melodramatic--but hey, so is this book!--but she ruined her life over a man who refused to admit that he cared for her until he was on his deathbed. Emma, honey, he wasn't worth all that effort.
As other reviewers have reported, not a lot happens in the middle of the novel and then suddenly half a dozen tragedies happened at once. It almost felt like Mary Hays had ran out of time and/or paper and had to ramp the storyline up. I'm not saying this book was terribly realistic before this point, but the arrival of a certain person at Emma's house felt very contrived, and the number of tragedies that befell her family--three deaths, an abortion, a suicide--felt ridiculously over-the-top and not altogether necessary. I'm not entirely sure what lesson Emma was supposed to learn from all these events. Perhaps: Augustus wasn't worth it, look at all the people you killed?! I'm afraid the last forty pages of the book spoiled it for me. I could have put up with Emma's pining over Augustus, but the events of the last forty pages needed to be spaced out better in order for the reader to handle them better and not just roll their eyes.
This was definitely an interesting novel, I only wish Mary Hays had paced the ending better in order for me to appreciate it more. 3*
I was confused by all the negative reviews when I began reading this book, but now as I come to a close, I can understand the complaints. This novel initially captivated me, and I was surprised to find some of the elements of Emma's life akin to those you'd come across in an Austen novel--a young woman passed between relatives due to deaths in her family, an unusual upbringing giving her a freedom to study typically unfeminine subjects, ultimately culminating in her being a bit too forward with a gentleman she has set her heart upon.
I have absolutely no objections to women being open about their feelings with a man they're interested in, and I could see in Emma a lot of who I was as a teenager--convinced I was madly in love with a boy who just wanted to be friends. However, I got frustrated with Emma's incessant chasing of Augustus after a while. I couldn't understand why she was still obsessed with a man who clearly did not care for her. It might sound a little melodramatic--but hey, so is this book!--but she ruined her life over a man who refused to admit that he cared for her until he was on his deathbed. Emma, honey, he wasn't worth all that effort.
As other reviewers have reported, not a lot happens in the middle of the novel and then suddenly half a dozen tragedies happened at once. It almost felt like Mary Hays had ran out of time and/or paper and had to ramp the storyline up. I'm not saying this book was terribly realistic before this point, but the arrival of a certain person at Emma's house felt very contrived, and the number of tragedies that befell her family--three deaths, an abortion, a suicide--felt ridiculously over-the-top and not altogether necessary. I'm not entirely sure what lesson Emma was supposed to learn from all these events. Perhaps: Augustus wasn't worth it, look at all the people you killed?! I'm afraid the last forty pages of the book spoiled it for me. I could have put up with Emma's pining over Augustus, but the events of the last forty pages needed to be spaced out better in order for the reader to handle them better and not just roll their eyes.
This was definitely an interesting novel, I only wish Mary Hays had paced the ending better in order for me to appreciate it more. 3*
November 9, 2024
1790s situationships…gawd we’re really in the trenches with this one. The smart SMART author and subject, Emma Courtney falls for her slightly preoccupied tutor (er yeah, preoccupied with his secret marriage). She pens the most eloquent letters of love and philosophy, the humble dms of Hinge would tremble in Courtney’s presence, all the while receiving no response from her lover, undoubtedly tired from the venture of two timing.
We suffer along with Courtney as she spills her heart to this abject addressee and see her finally move on thanks to some letters from friends who effectively tell her, Girl get up! You need to stop rotting in bed over this dude. Needless to say she did, and lived out the rest of her life. Good for you babe!
Oh also, a quick fuck you to the prick that wrote multiple snarky comments in the library copy I was reading, calling Courtney a ‘bitch’, possessing ‘suffocating pride’ and writing ‘self-moralising trash’. Firstly, check your misogyny before committing it to page. Secondly, if a woman expressing her romantic anguish in such a detailed and explicit mode irritates you so greatly, I would suggest reflecting on your own repressed ass before judging someone else’s.
We suffer along with Courtney as she spills her heart to this abject addressee and see her finally move on thanks to some letters from friends who effectively tell her, Girl get up! You need to stop rotting in bed over this dude. Needless to say she did, and lived out the rest of her life. Good for you babe!
Oh also, a quick fuck you to the prick that wrote multiple snarky comments in the library copy I was reading, calling Courtney a ‘bitch’, possessing ‘suffocating pride’ and writing ‘self-moralising trash’. Firstly, check your misogyny before committing it to page. Secondly, if a woman expressing her romantic anguish in such a detailed and explicit mode irritates you so greatly, I would suggest reflecting on your own repressed ass before judging someone else’s.
August 28, 2018
A fictional memoir that is a coming of age story for young women of the 18th century. This is where you see the constant conflict of reason and romantic themes. It is not a plot driven book but the ideas and some of the plotlines make it one interesting read, especially Emma Courtney's obsession over a gentleman. Think "My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" in the 18th Century and without the musical numbers.
July 16, 2021
2.5
obsessed with the duality of writing a proto-feminist novel but then it literally just being a rewrite of your own life and the main thing u change is the real-life guy you're in love with actually being in love with you too and making his real-life wife die so he can come and confess his love for you. mary hays invented making up scenarios in your head that will never happen
obsessed with the duality of writing a proto-feminist novel but then it literally just being a rewrite of your own life and the main thing u change is the real-life guy you're in love with actually being in love with you too and making his real-life wife die so he can come and confess his love for you. mary hays invented making up scenarios in your head that will never happen
April 15, 2021
Because I admire the fiery political mind of Mary Wollstonecraft, I was excited to read a novel by an author who was one of her acolytes and a notable feminist voice in her own right.
Most of Mary Hays’ cultural and historical importance is traced to two key concepts explored in Memoirs: 1.) a woman’s right to marry for love, not for financial security or social status; and 2.) the value of emotion in a world that favors reason. Both of these ideas were quite radical during Hays’ time, and I was eager to see how she advanced this platform through her art.
Unfortunately, despite having the occasional moment of brilliance, Memoirs of Emma Courtney fell far short of my expectations in just about every possible measure.
The plot, although largely just a vessel for Hays’ social commentary, is nonetheless contrived and poorly realized. Emma is an orphan who falls in love with a man who does not reciprocate her feelings. She must learn to reconcile this disappointment and find her place in a world that disvalues emotional displays.
Theoretically this is a simple enough conceit. We as readers can watch Emma cope with heartbreak and balance her urge to break the status quo with the realities of surviving in a patriarchal society.
The problem is anytime a conflict emerges that complicates Emma’s worldview, or presents her with a challenge to rise above, Hays introduces a convenient solution or an abysmally miscarried plot twist that immediately vacuums up all dramatic tension.
One effect of this constant interference is that it completely cheapens all of the conflict Emma endures, converting potentially interesting character moments into annoying, prolonged melodramas with no payoff in her development. Another terrible consequence is that Hays ends up undermining virtually all of her own thematic messages.
Take the ending revelation, for example, that Apart from being a wildly unbelievable and abrupt shift in character, the inclusion of this ‘twist’ regresses Emma, too, completely validating all of her character flaws with a convenient and unearned reward.
Any thematic momentum not stifled by plot decisions is swallowed up by the novel’s vaguely developed conflict. What is the main conflict in Memoirs? Ostensibly, it is ‘character vs. society’––but why then does Hays remove all societal/structural obstacles between Emma and her goal? If it is ‘character vs. self,’ why does Emma fail to undergo any meaningful change?
Although it quickly became clear there was little substance to be found in the novel’s narrative, I held out hope of finding some worthwhile political rhetoric. Unfortunately, this too was tepid and underdeveloped.
Most of this rhetoric is found in Emma’s letters addressed to Mr. Francis, her philosophizing mentor, or Augustus, her love interest. Functionally, Hays uses Francis and Augustus’ letters as counterpoints to Emma’s positions on love, ‘principles’ and ‘feeling.’
The idea is that Emma can argue how feminine sentimentality is not a vice, but actually a key part of human experience.
The problem is Emma is routinely out-argued, and all of her rhetorical victories come from shooting down straw man arguments.
Whereas Wollstonecraft is unflinching and sharp in her observations, Hays is so timid and one-dimensional she frequently sabotages herself. Add in that the character of Emma doesn’t even apply her own principles consistently, and it’s easy to see why I’m scoring this so low.
While Memoirs of Emma Courtney is not without some merit, I can truly only recommend it to dedicated fans of Romantic writing, or for someone looking for a foil to better feminist writers. It’s a stylistically bland, poorly-executed political novel with great intentions but little else. 1.5/5
Most of Mary Hays’ cultural and historical importance is traced to two key concepts explored in Memoirs: 1.) a woman’s right to marry for love, not for financial security or social status; and 2.) the value of emotion in a world that favors reason. Both of these ideas were quite radical during Hays’ time, and I was eager to see how she advanced this platform through her art.
Unfortunately, despite having the occasional moment of brilliance, Memoirs of Emma Courtney fell far short of my expectations in just about every possible measure.
The plot, although largely just a vessel for Hays’ social commentary, is nonetheless contrived and poorly realized. Emma is an orphan who falls in love with a man who does not reciprocate her feelings. She must learn to reconcile this disappointment and find her place in a world that disvalues emotional displays.
Theoretically this is a simple enough conceit. We as readers can watch Emma cope with heartbreak and balance her urge to break the status quo with the realities of surviving in a patriarchal society.
The problem is anytime a conflict emerges that complicates Emma’s worldview, or presents her with a challenge to rise above, Hays introduces a convenient solution or an abysmally miscarried plot twist that immediately vacuums up all dramatic tension.
One effect of this constant interference is that it completely cheapens all of the conflict Emma endures, converting potentially interesting character moments into annoying, prolonged melodramas with no payoff in her development. Another terrible consequence is that Hays ends up undermining virtually all of her own thematic messages.
Take the ending revelation, for example, that Apart from being a wildly unbelievable and abrupt shift in character, the inclusion of this ‘twist’ regresses Emma, too, completely validating all of her character flaws with a convenient and unearned reward.
Any thematic momentum not stifled by plot decisions is swallowed up by the novel’s vaguely developed conflict. What is the main conflict in Memoirs? Ostensibly, it is ‘character vs. society’––but why then does Hays remove all societal/structural obstacles between Emma and her goal? If it is ‘character vs. self,’ why does Emma fail to undergo any meaningful change?
Although it quickly became clear there was little substance to be found in the novel’s narrative, I held out hope of finding some worthwhile political rhetoric. Unfortunately, this too was tepid and underdeveloped.
Most of this rhetoric is found in Emma’s letters addressed to Mr. Francis, her philosophizing mentor, or Augustus, her love interest. Functionally, Hays uses Francis and Augustus’ letters as counterpoints to Emma’s positions on love, ‘principles’ and ‘feeling.’
The idea is that Emma can argue how feminine sentimentality is not a vice, but actually a key part of human experience.
The problem is Emma is routinely out-argued, and all of her rhetorical victories come from shooting down straw man arguments.
Whereas Wollstonecraft is unflinching and sharp in her observations, Hays is so timid and one-dimensional she frequently sabotages herself. Add in that the character of Emma doesn’t even apply her own principles consistently, and it’s easy to see why I’m scoring this so low.
While Memoirs of Emma Courtney is not without some merit, I can truly only recommend it to dedicated fans of Romantic writing, or for someone looking for a foil to better feminist writers. It’s a stylistically bland, poorly-executed political novel with great intentions but little else. 1.5/5
August 9, 2018
This book is written from the perspective of Emma Courtney and she is writing the memoirs of her life to her ‘son’ Augustus to explain his past to him.
Emma had a hard beginning and ended up reaching adulthood with no fortune and no real family to care for her. She was brought up in a middle class manner but soon finds that unless she wants to be a teacher/governess or servant, there are not really any other occupations open to a single woman.
Emma falls in love with her friend Augustus and repeatedly writes to him to tell him her feelings. Augustus does not reciprocate these and I just wanted to shake Emma to tell her to get a grip and say he’s just not that into you! I see from the introduction that this was similar for Mary Hays and a lot of the letters were pretty much the same as she wrote in real life so I feel a bit sorry for her.
It turns out that Augustus was already married with children so could not reciprocate Emma’s feelings and it doesn’t look like she has any avenues in life. Another man who has always been in love with her offers to marry her and although she explains to him that she does not love him like she does Augustus, she accepts and they marry and have a daughter, also called Emma.
Emma’s husband thought that he could live with her loving someone else but when Augustus is in a terrible accident and dies, Emma adopts his son (also called Augustus) and Emma’s husband cannot handle it. He ends up committing suicide and to be honest, Emma could have been a better wife.
Emma brings up Emma and Augustus together and it looks like they will fall in love but then she reveals that her daughter sadly died at 14.
It’s a sad ending to quite a sad book.
Emma had a hard beginning and ended up reaching adulthood with no fortune and no real family to care for her. She was brought up in a middle class manner but soon finds that unless she wants to be a teacher/governess or servant, there are not really any other occupations open to a single woman.
Emma falls in love with her friend Augustus and repeatedly writes to him to tell him her feelings. Augustus does not reciprocate these and I just wanted to shake Emma to tell her to get a grip and say he’s just not that into you! I see from the introduction that this was similar for Mary Hays and a lot of the letters were pretty much the same as she wrote in real life so I feel a bit sorry for her.
It turns out that Augustus was already married with children so could not reciprocate Emma’s feelings and it doesn’t look like she has any avenues in life. Another man who has always been in love with her offers to marry her and although she explains to him that she does not love him like she does Augustus, she accepts and they marry and have a daughter, also called Emma.
Emma’s husband thought that he could live with her loving someone else but when Augustus is in a terrible accident and dies, Emma adopts his son (also called Augustus) and Emma’s husband cannot handle it. He ends up committing suicide and to be honest, Emma could have been a better wife.
Emma brings up Emma and Augustus together and it looks like they will fall in love but then she reveals that her daughter sadly died at 14.
It’s a sad ending to quite a sad book.
July 16, 2021
2-2.5
The whole time I was just wondering why this is considered feminist when it literally revolves around the worshiping of a man? She makes some interesting points about sexism but I just feel like they become irrelevant in the grand scheme of the book. Wtf was the ending??
The whole time I was just wondering why this is considered feminist when it literally revolves around the worshiping of a man? She makes some interesting points about sexism but I just feel like they become irrelevant in the grand scheme of the book. Wtf was the ending??
December 6, 2023
please for the love of god shut the fuck up, i don’t think i’ve ever switched from loving to hating a protagonist this much before….. but she is just fucking insufferable
got the one star for good politics tho, i was impressed by how liberal some of the feminism/anti-war sentiments were
got the one star for good politics tho, i was impressed by how liberal some of the feminism/anti-war sentiments were
September 28, 2019
I liked it, but it was not a favorite. I did like the writing style with the letters. (For The English Novel class) Hays was very extra sometimes, too.
February 20, 2024
if i told you what the last 25% of this book was about you wouldn't believe me
Read
September 26, 2025Emma Courtney they could never make me hate you
June 27, 2021
In the end, the only thing I truly enjoyed about the book was mocking it. Ouch. See my blog entry:
The Memoirs of Emma Courtney was written by Mary Hays at the end of the 18th century. She was best buds with Mary Wollstonecraft and, like W, ascribed to a set of proto-feminist views. Hays's novel, Memoirs, is semi-autobiographical and provides a platform for some of her opinions on women's education, rights, roles, etc. in her society. I read the book for one of my graduate seminars, Communal Romanticism, and thought I'd share some of the lessons learned in Top Ten format.
10. quotation marks don't work for indirect dialogue (so confusing)
9. not all letters should be shared with others; some, frankly, just aren't all that interesting (sorry for my previous post if any of you felt that way towards it)
8. stalking isn't only a 20th century experience
7. society's restrictive attitudes towards women don't cut it as a good excuse for stalking someone
6. girls have been overanalyzing guy's comments for a long time
5. when a guy says "I'm not going to answer your personally invasive question," he means he's not going to answer your personally invasive question (not that he secretly wishes you'd keep bugging him about it for months on end)
4. when a guy doesn't respond to your letters, it means he's just not that into you
3. when a guy just isn't that into you, writing him exhausting letters isn't going to change that
2. you clearly have issues if you choose the woman who obsessed over you to the point where she ruined your financial standing, social reputation, and marriage as the guardian of your only child (ditto for falling in love with the same woman)
1. a young woman+romantic literature+semi-rational education = a self-admitted crazy person
Feel like reading the book now?
[Edited my Goodreads review to add the original blog post from October 2009.]
The Memoirs of Emma Courtney was written by Mary Hays at the end of the 18th century. She was best buds with Mary Wollstonecraft and, like W, ascribed to a set of proto-feminist views. Hays's novel, Memoirs, is semi-autobiographical and provides a platform for some of her opinions on women's education, rights, roles, etc. in her society. I read the book for one of my graduate seminars, Communal Romanticism, and thought I'd share some of the lessons learned in Top Ten format.
10. quotation marks don't work for indirect dialogue (so confusing)
9. not all letters should be shared with others; some, frankly, just aren't all that interesting (sorry for my previous post if any of you felt that way towards it)
8. stalking isn't only a 20th century experience
7. society's restrictive attitudes towards women don't cut it as a good excuse for stalking someone
6. girls have been overanalyzing guy's comments for a long time
5. when a guy says "I'm not going to answer your personally invasive question," he means he's not going to answer your personally invasive question (not that he secretly wishes you'd keep bugging him about it for months on end)
4. when a guy doesn't respond to your letters, it means he's just not that into you
3. when a guy just isn't that into you, writing him exhausting letters isn't going to change that
2. you clearly have issues if you choose the woman who obsessed over you to the point where she ruined your financial standing, social reputation, and marriage as the guardian of your only child (ditto for falling in love with the same woman)
1. a young woman+romantic literature+semi-rational education = a self-admitted crazy person
Feel like reading the book now?
[Edited my Goodreads review to add the original blog post from October 2009.]
October 15, 2017
A book read for my Master's degree on a module called 'The Literature of Crisis: Gender and Politics in 1790's Britain." It's by far not the worst book I've read but I just found it rather boring for the most part. I had little interest in Emma as a character and honestly wanted to just scream at her to /get over him already/ (I have very little patience for romance and especially pining).
Mary Hays' writing style was certainly the easiest to read of what we have had to read for this module so far, however the lack of an interesting plot for the majority of the book made it somewhat a trudge to get through nonetheless. I do look forward to discussing it in class.
The most fascinating parts of the novel are the political moment and perhaps if this had been more outrightly political throughout it might have kept my attention. Emma's opinion on solider's working in the act of murder was both passionate and evocative and lead to a genuinely interesting discussion. The talk of slavery and gender was gripping and I wanted more political debates and less 'Why doesn't Mr Harvey love me, oh Augustus whyyyy?" really.
Mary Hays' writing style was certainly the easiest to read of what we have had to read for this module so far, however the lack of an interesting plot for the majority of the book made it somewhat a trudge to get through nonetheless. I do look forward to discussing it in class.
The most fascinating parts of the novel are the political moment and perhaps if this had been more outrightly political throughout it might have kept my attention. Emma's opinion on solider's working in the act of murder was both passionate and evocative and lead to a genuinely interesting discussion. The talk of slavery and gender was gripping and I wanted more political debates and less 'Why doesn't Mr Harvey love me, oh Augustus whyyyy?" really.
March 30, 2018
It was going p well until that ending!
Jeeeeeeez
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Jeeeeeeez
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
January 1, 2023
This was required reading for a class I’m taking this semester about Romanticism, and honestly, before this, I’d never heard of this book or Mary Hays, but she’s quite the fascinating figure. I actually ended up really enjoying this as well—it’s a bit of a wild ride at times, but it was really interesting to read and research. It’s really hard to discuss this without going into a full academic essay explaining all the little intricacies that are in here—like I said, Hays was a really fascinating subject to read about, especially in terms of looking at this as semi-autobiographical or deciding to look at it from a different lens. This is sadly the only thing we’re discussing from Hays this semester, but I’ll definitely be looking into her other works in my own time. Now here’s hoping I enjoy some of the other works I’ll be reading for class as much as I have this.
March 29, 2019
That ending though, I mean I didn’t want her to have a happy ending but holy hell that was insane.
April 25, 2022
this woman is completely out of her mind I just can't
January 2, 2025
Written in the 1790s this feels more like a mid-century novel and is one of the most philosophically orientated referring to Descartes, Rousseau, Hume and Locke. She begins by stating that she intends to portray her heroine as human rather than a conduct book example for others to follow. Indeed she paints her heroine Emma as vain, impatient and wilful, but equally affectionate and warm. Like all books of this era, fiction is seen as a corrupting influence strengthening wild imaginings and false expectations. Her aunt refers to this as the illusion of the imagination undermining the discernment of truth and virtue. Emma’s father is unusual in wanting to teach his daughter history and science, rather than artistic accomplishments. Yet she still bemoans the fact that women are not educated for any kind of independent living.
The book takes a political stand referring to the misery of mankind due to the error and vice of political institutions. She also argues that the person who surrenders their understanding to another loses the dignity of a rational being and becomes a mere puppet. Obedience is seen as surrendering to a foreign authority, quenching action, reason and virtue. This is in keeping with the anti-Catholic and anti-French sentiment of the time.
A direct example of politics is given with a reference to the revolts in the West Indies in the 1790s. At a dinner party with a landowner, Emma is asked to agree that all soldiers are agreeable and charming, to which she replies their trade is murder with trappings of pomp and sacrifice. She compares them with ruffians and thieves who are rendered desperate by poverty and use the wrong means to redress this. Soldiers, she argues, kill wantonly and in cold blood, ravaging towns and cities. The planter’s wife complains she can not retain servants, as they will not tolerate being treated as slaves. She is also offended by having her judgement questioned by people she considers low and ignorant, who should obey the orders of their superiors. Mr Melmouth then undercuts her by arguing what business servants or women have to do with thinking. When Emma is criticised for her view of the men she responds that being treated like an idiot is not a compliment and they flatter and despise weakness in ladies they help to form.
All these views are framed by an ill-fated love story in which Emma idolises August as the hero of a romantic novel. The reality is Emma needs to marry for financial security.
The book takes a political stand referring to the misery of mankind due to the error and vice of political institutions. She also argues that the person who surrenders their understanding to another loses the dignity of a rational being and becomes a mere puppet. Obedience is seen as surrendering to a foreign authority, quenching action, reason and virtue. This is in keeping with the anti-Catholic and anti-French sentiment of the time.
A direct example of politics is given with a reference to the revolts in the West Indies in the 1790s. At a dinner party with a landowner, Emma is asked to agree that all soldiers are agreeable and charming, to which she replies their trade is murder with trappings of pomp and sacrifice. She compares them with ruffians and thieves who are rendered desperate by poverty and use the wrong means to redress this. Soldiers, she argues, kill wantonly and in cold blood, ravaging towns and cities. The planter’s wife complains she can not retain servants, as they will not tolerate being treated as slaves. She is also offended by having her judgement questioned by people she considers low and ignorant, who should obey the orders of their superiors. Mr Melmouth then undercuts her by arguing what business servants or women have to do with thinking. When Emma is criticised for her view of the men she responds that being treated like an idiot is not a compliment and they flatter and despise weakness in ladies they help to form.
All these views are framed by an ill-fated love story in which Emma idolises August as the hero of a romantic novel. The reality is Emma needs to marry for financial security.
July 1, 2024
As a semi autobiographical epistolary novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, focuses on Emma Courtney's unrequited love for Augustus Harley - something very similar to Mary Hays' own passionate struggle with romance.
In all honesty, Emma was very interesting! She is definitely not the idealised female heroine that eighteenth century and present day readers would be expecting, but rather she is just a tad bit insane.
I genuinely have no objections to women being open about their feelings with a man that they're interested in, but it did become frustrating to read and see Emma's deep obsession with Augustus. Okay, of course, Hays does a brilliant job in questioning common marital arrangements and courtship rituals through Emma, but I just didn't understand why she was still obsessed with a man who clearly did not care for her in that way. Girl - just move on!
It screamed "second-hand embarrassment" and "crazy ex girlfriend" vibes, all in a melodramatic tone that wasn't necessary. Sorry to say that, because of this, it clouded my opinions on this book!
In all honesty, Emma was very interesting! She is definitely not the idealised female heroine that eighteenth century and present day readers would be expecting, but rather she is just a tad bit insane.
I genuinely have no objections to women being open about their feelings with a man that they're interested in, but it did become frustrating to read and see Emma's deep obsession with Augustus. Okay, of course, Hays does a brilliant job in questioning common marital arrangements and courtship rituals through Emma, but I just didn't understand why she was still obsessed with a man who clearly did not care for her in that way. Girl - just move on!
It screamed "second-hand embarrassment" and "crazy ex girlfriend" vibes, all in a melodramatic tone that wasn't necessary. Sorry to say that, because of this, it clouded my opinions on this book!
July 4, 2024
Dear Emma Courtney,
Since you were so wrongly treated in the comments section I would like to dedicate this comment to you.
We, 21st century readers cannot approach your story with through our time's lenses. Yes you may seem boring, yes you cry all the time but you only do that because of a sentimental tradition you are inserted in.
Moreover, having your memoir as a series of letters you write to your son about the wrongs of your life is very interesting. Having a text being pushed forward as such in the 18th century must have been very radical, especially because you were not afraid of portraying your passions, even when misdirected.
Besides that, the political and philosophical approaches to your story were very interesting as well considering the time and who and what you were engaging with. Having a feminist piece by the end of the 18th century is not a particular conquest of yours but it is a great addition to the history of female and feminist writing.
Yours sincerely,
Paula.
Since you were so wrongly treated in the comments section I would like to dedicate this comment to you.
We, 21st century readers cannot approach your story with through our time's lenses. Yes you may seem boring, yes you cry all the time but you only do that because of a sentimental tradition you are inserted in.
Moreover, having your memoir as a series of letters you write to your son about the wrongs of your life is very interesting. Having a text being pushed forward as such in the 18th century must have been very radical, especially because you were not afraid of portraying your passions, even when misdirected.
Besides that, the political and philosophical approaches to your story were very interesting as well considering the time and who and what you were engaging with. Having a feminist piece by the end of the 18th century is not a particular conquest of yours but it is a great addition to the history of female and feminist writing.
Yours sincerely,
Paula.
September 30, 2025
This has secured itself as one of my least favourite books ever written. Its letter form does it no justice, and makes the novel more of a collection of essays than anything. Not only that but the essays drone on and on endlessly relaying philosophical drivel. Emma Courtney has no redeemable qualities, and chases after a man while taking any chance to put down others of her own sex. The only exciting parts are outside of the letters (the autobiographical parts) and are fictional eccentricities which Hays has decided to add in. I would not recommend this mind numbing torture device to my worst enemy.
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