Mary Hays
The Victim of Prejudice
The Victim of Prejudice
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Description
Mary Raymond is raised by her guardian with every advantage a thoughtful education can give her: a strong mind, a fearless conscience, and a sense of her own worth that owes nothing to rank or fortune. None of it saves her. A single act of violence committed against her by a man she trusts becomes, in the eyes of the world, not his crime but her permanent disgrace — and for the rest of her life, however virtuously she acts, however plainly her innocence can be shown, society treats her as ruined. The Victim of Prejudice follows Mary from the sheltered idyll of her childhood through a lengthening series of injustices, each one inflicted not by fate but by other people's certainty that a woman's worth is decided by rumor rather than by truth.
Mary Hays wrote the novel in 1799, partly in answer to critics who had accused her previous book of endorsing the very passions it was written to warn against. Here she leaves no room for that misreading: the target is not her heroine's conduct but the "prejudice" of the title itself, the reflex by which a wronged woman is punished more surely than the man who wronged her. It stands alongside William Godwin's Caleb Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria as one of the sharpest political novels to come out of the 1790s, and it has been read by almost no one since. This Nile Book Store edition restores the complete, unabridged text, including Hays's own original preface and framing introduction.
Author & Genre
Mary Hays (1759–1843) was an English novelist and essayist who moved in the radical circle around William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and who argued in her own nonfiction for women's education and legal equality decades before either cause had wide support. Genre: Sentimental Fiction / Social Protest Novel.
"A generous heroism nerved my mind, throbbed in my bosom, glowed on my cheek, a spirit congenial to artless youth, by whom the veil of society, behind which corruption and contradiction lurk, has not been rent."
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