In 1798, a year after the death of the renowned feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, her friend, the Unitarian writer and polemist, Mary Hays, authored her own tract on the subject of women’s liberation. Entitled Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, the publication was not intended to compete with Wollstonecraft’s fiery A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Hays wished to address the major societal issue of inequality between the sexes from a less adversarial angle. As opposed to Wollstonecraft, in her introduction, Mary Hays assumes a posture of humility when stating her ambition: ‘to restore female character to its dignity and independence.’ This paper discusses the rhetorical devices employed by Hays to modify the engrained ideas of her anticipated male readers. Her tract is divided into a set argumentative sequences in the shape of seven chapters. The first of these calls in question the reliance on the Scripture as a foundation for the acceptance of the male-female hierarchy. The second seeks to invalidate the conviction that the subjection of women’s in society could be condoned through rational causes. The third and fourth chapters give an overview of some major, misconceptions of men with regard to women’s capabilities. Chapter five and six illustrate plentiful examples of unsavoury realities of female existence. In the last chapter of the Appeal, Mary Hays delivers a set of exhortations and hopeful recommendations for effectuating a change. The overall aim of the paper is to identify and analyse Hays’s strategy for converting the opposite sex, not through revolutionary ferocity or meek supplications, but through constructive persuasiveness. In a concluding section some supportive male intellectuals are introduced to illustrate Hays’s achievement of a middle ground on which to communicate.

 The current paper seeks to investigate the achievements of two female writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries representing two European countries: Mary Hays and Pauline de Meulan-Guizot. They were both highly involved in the issue of education, albeit from separate angles. Mary Hays, an adept of Godwinian and Helvetian philosophies, emphasized the need for schooling in general, and for girls in particular, and much of her journalism was dedicated to the cause of female liberation. Pauline de Meulan wrote several pedagogical and didactic works, both together with her husband, the liberal politician François Guizot,and independently. Her concern was mainly focussed on the moral upbringing of the young.  The aim of this study is to consider the difference in purpose of the two writers as well as identifying the links between them.

Maryse Condé transposes the action of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to Guadeloupe in order to exemplify the impact of colonialism and the social injustices that have been maintained on this island.

At regular intervals the dramatic lives of Shelley and Byron and their literary circle have attracted new biographical interest. Lately, the focus has tended to be on the female members of the circle such as in Miranda Seymour’s Mary Shelley (2000) and Janet Todd’s Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle (2007). As a new addition to this field, Daisy Hay, has produced an inspiring composite work entitled Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (2010), that embraces both men and women. The book is an important and refreshing contribution to an established area of scholarship, and broadens the spectrum of study by including several names that are not usually mentioned in connection to the centre of the Shelley-Byron affiliation.

During the decades that preceded the height of the Romantic age, innovative ideas were spreading across Europe, foreshadowing changes to come. Many of the ideas that were in circulation resonated powerfully in writings beyond the realm of published works. As contemporary letters issued from the personal sphere give evidence of, literary ideals had a direct influence over the life of individuals. This paper explores the letters of Mary Hays as an expression of the mêlée of conflicting ideals that the reading public of the late 1770s had to adjust themselves to. Before she became a writer, Mary Hays had been separated from her fiancé John Eccles for two years due to family difficulties, and established a clandestine correspondence with him in order to maintain contact. Together they imitated the immensely popular mode of epistolary writing; as a young couple sharing a passion for reading they invigorated their written dialogue by appropriating many literary expressions and characterisations. With the pervasive allusions to writers such as Alexander Pope, James Stephens, Frances Brooke, and Wolfgang Goethe, their correspondence offers a suggestive insight into the contrasting standpoints that characterised an era of transition later to be defined as “Pre-Romantic”.

The poet Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849) was marginalised  for a long time while  trying to develop his artistry under the shadow of his father, the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). He did not really gain recognition until at the beginning of the 21st century, in our own era of ecological awareness. Now, his poetry has been received as a pertinent combining of "the trivialand the monumental". His sensitive, minute recordings of hardly perceivable bucolic and sylvan scenes have earned him a reputation as a "miniaturist" and foreshadower of the current awakening to the precarious fragility of nature.