Success in Writing
In 1791 she replied to Gilbert Wakefield a pamphlet with the didactic title, Cursory Remarks on An Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship, using the nom-de-plume Eusebia. The Cambridge mathematician William Frend wrote to her enthusiastically about it. This blossomed into a brief romance, but Frend was less enthusiastic than Hays. In 1792 Hays was given a copy of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. It made a deep impression on her. Hays contacted the publisher of the book, Joseph Johnson, which led to her becoming friends with Wollstonecraft. Hays next wrote a book Letters and Essays (1793) and invited Mary Wollstonecraft to comment on it before publication. Although the reviews were mixed Hays decided to leave home and to try to support herself by writing. She moved to Hatton Garden. She did not have enough money to buy Enquiry concerning Political Justice by William Godwin. Boldly she wrote to the author and asked to borrow it. This turned into a friendship, in which Godwin became a guide and teacher.
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Famous quotes containing the words success and/or writing:
“The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)