Mary Tisdal Reading, by Angelica Kauffmann, Joslyn Art Museum, USA
Sensibility and reason in "The memoirs of Emma Courtney"
Passion, morality, and the pursuit of virtue in Mary Hayes' 18th century novel
The memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) by Mary Hayes is one of the most philosophical of eighteenth-century novels. In the preface, she states that anything that sets the mind in motion is good. That free speaking and thinking are a virtue and the characteristic of a rational being. Her aim is not to represent her heroine as an idea of perfection but as a human being, presenting her errors as an offspring of sensibility, a warning, not an example.
