Mary Hays was a radical feminist whose writings brought her to the attention of her contemporaries William Blake, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. This edition of Mary Hays's Female Biography is the first modern scholarly edition since its publication in 1803. When it appeared, Female Biography was the first history of women since Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies (1405), the first in English, and the first compendium of women by either male or female compilers since Thomas Heywood's Generall Historie of Women (1624, 1657) to include rebellious and impious figures, as...