Fiction and Autobiography in Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796)

This essay was runner‐up in the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Romanticism Section. Although current critical strictures prohibit the reading of biography between the lines of fiction, Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) demands that we do so. The novel is laced with autobiography. The novel developed out of a suggestion by the philosopher William Godwin that Hays write a sketch of her life in order to challenge her ‘habitual melancholy’. Thus, although Emma Courtney is not an autobiography in the strictest sense of the term, the discourse of autobiography is fundamental to it. Emma Courtney reproduces almost verbatim much of Hays's correspondence. The novel is literally sourced from life, quilted from the textual acts of that life, its letters. The autobiographical mode used by the novel transpires into an investigation of the relationship between fiction and reality. Godwin's mentoring of Hays illuminates this complex relationship between autobiography and fiction. Godwin's criticism of Hays's novel crystallises into a debate about reality. In their dialogue, Hays defends the imagination as a valid, and more importantly, inevitable part of experience. This enquires into the very possibility of the Godwinian ‘virtue’ of self‐knowledge by making the Real itself problematic.