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Freud familiarizes his readers with the notion that telepathy may become a valid communication form. He also suggests that individuals may have initially utilized telepathy as the original, archaic communication method. His concept was probably based on several earlier notions regarding one's ability to directly communicate with others. Also, it addresses psychoanalytic concepts about unconscious communication and unconscious intersubjective exchanges between the text and its readers. Autobiographical memoirs and epistolary fiction play no small part in creating subjectivity as these ideas connect together the origins of the eighteenth-century novel. This chapter utilizes Mary Hay's Memoirs of Emma Courtney as a part of the Enlightenment project in the studying of the human mind. Particular focus is drawn to an ideal communication form referred to as the ‘vehicular state’.

For Johnson, biography should reveal the ‘domestick privacies’ of the great man. This chapter proposes that a helpful way to understand biography, as it developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is as an ideologically driven representation and publication of domestic life. It looks at the work of Johnson and Boswell in conjunction with collective female biographies, by Mary Hays and others, in the context of the development of a middle‐class domestic ideology. Boswell's Life of Johnson was received as gossip – a discourse that transgressed boundaries of class and gender by moving disconcertingly between public and private life. Collective female biography presented a more overtly ideological vision of domestic life. The chapter concludes by looking at how the expansion of publishing from the,1780s, and the market success of biography, contributed to a shift in thinking about what it meant to be ‘published’ as a biographical subject.

This chapter evaluates the contours of republican poetics in the English Jacobin novels of Godwin, Holcroft, Hays, and Inchbald. Focusing on the invocation of classical texts and Roman historical models, it reveals how Jacobin fiction attempts to replace the pedagogical lessons drawn from the exemplary heroes of classical history while reproducing a “Plutarchian” mode of exemplarity, one which suggests that novels, in a manner similar to a traditional understanding of classical history, enable a better understanding of society through knowledge of the individual and that novels can therefore supplement or replace classical history as a means of promoting virtue. One of the ways Jacobin novels underscore this potential of the novel form is through their self‐reflexive representation of discursive processes like writing, revision, and, especially, reading, which then becomes an index of how these novels imagine their impact upon a reader.

This chapter investigates the legacy of John Locke's ideas about education, reading, and identity formation. Focusing on conduct and educational literature, as well as material from the Lady's Magazine, it identifies the way in which representations of reading construct a version of female identity founded on metaphors of exchange. It subsequently describes how writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays and Hannah More view reading as offering a strategic resistance to such commercial forms of identity, before turning to Charles Frognall Dibdin's paean to the printed word, Bibliomania (1809). There, expectations about reading and gender are inverted, as Dibdin goes about depicting an idealised, prudent female reader.

This chapter addresses the relationship between acts of reading and British responses to the French Revolution. In the work of authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, William Godwin and Mary Hays, education offers the means through which ideas about social progress can be brought to fruition. However, finding the most appropriate method of ensuring the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another proves a sensitive affair, raising questions about the ethics of parental authority. This chapter is particularly concerned with the extent to which children and young women were granted what Godwin describes in The Enquirer as ‘choice in reading’. While Godwin was attacked for advocating a ‘system of indiscriminate reading’, the prohibition of particular texts only serves to render them more attractive to readers. For the writers discussed, domestic scenes of reading become the testing ground for exploring the limits of individual liberty.

This chapter treats 1790s feminist writing by Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Mary Robinson, tracing conflicts in their thought created by the question of the animal. Faced by the animalization of women based on their identification with the sexual and reproductive body, feminists appealed to a disembodied reason to argue for their equality with men; but their sympathy with nonhuman animals as sharing in their victimization by men encouraged some revaluation of animality. Wollstonecraft’s foundational work on the rights of woman makes an anthropocentric commitment to unique human rationality, and reveals anxieties attributable to her reading of natural history discourses that naturalized the subordination of women. Robinson shows greater confidence in disembodied reason as guarantor of gender equality. The chapter traces the development of sympathetic responses both to human animality and nonhuman animals in Macaulay, Hays, and in Wollstonecraft’s own later work.

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment efforts at comprehensive mastery gave way to different uses of system—to delimited and dedicated systems and to the dispersing of systems into other forms, including the specialized essays of the modern disciplines. Their “travel” filled the world in new ways. This transition highlights our differences from Enlightenment. For Smith, who based his master SYSTEMS on “sentiments” as probable behaviors, true knowledge was useful knowledge that worked in the world to change that world. For us knowledge is knowledge because it is true. The end-of-century proliferation of systems and of print made inclusive master SYSTEMS unsustainable. Late eighteenth-century Britain is a laboratory for studying the consequences of this proliferation: instead of becoming parts of master SYSTEMS, systems were inserted into other forms. This shifted the organization of knowledge from every kind being a branch of philosophy, moral or natural, into the specialized and professionalized disciplines of modernity. This “travel” of system into other forms—embedded systems—was exemplified by Mathus’s Population “essay,” and in works, also published in 1798, by William Wordsworth and Mary Hays. Systems embedded in other forms and stretched to accommodate more things meant system proliferated into every aspect of everyday life.

The subject here is system’s shaping of the subject of culture, literature, and liberalism—the modern self. Narrow-but-deep selves emerged from system’s role in mediating the formation of narrow-but-deep disciplines. With Mary Hays supplying a primary example, the chapter shows that when systems are extended through disciplinary travel so that they can no longer do what isolated systems do—they talk to themselves, the parts making a whole—another kind of self must be formally interpolated to do the talking. Embedded systems yield a newly expressive “I”—that is why in blaming The System we are also somehow blaming ourselves. This chapter bookends the tale of system and self by juxtaposing An Account of the Fair Intellectual-Club” from 1720 to Douglas Englebart’s report on Augmenting Human Intellect from 1962. In the former, young women try to improve themselves through system—both by forming a “club” as a social incarnation of system and by writing systems. In the latter, Englebart describes a “system” in which humans improve themselves by interfacing with technology. The presentation of this report announced the invention of the computer mouse. The chapter concludes by showing how issues of gender and privilege, secrecy and privacy, individual and national development, mix with new kinds of order and method generated by system.