Emma Courtney
Her next work, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) is probably her best-known work. The novel draws on the experience of her affair with William Frend, and may also have elements of her relationship with Godwin. The heroine falls in love with a penniless man Augustus Harley, and offers to live with him as his wife, without getting married. She is rejected and then turns to Mr Francis, a character based on Godwin. They exchange philosophical letters, but in the end he advises her against becoming too emotional. The critical response to the novel was divided along political lines. Free love is seen to be aligned with social and domestic repression is shown as upholding the political order.
About this time Hays started writing for the Analytical Review, a liberal magazine. Mary Wollstonecraft was the fiction editor. It was Mary Hays who is popularly credited with introducing William Godwin to Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1797 Wollstonecraft and Godwin married. When Mary Wollstonecraft was dying, because of complications following the birth of their daughter, Mary (Mary Shelley), it was Mary Hays who helped to nurse her. She also wrote an obituary of Wollstonecraft for the Annual Necrology.
Read more about this topic: Mary Hays