A few years ago I stumbled upon an old postcard that featured an illustration of a young woman dressed in a Regency-era gown and an open book on her lap. Below the image were a few lines of poetry that I didn’t recognize, but I planned to research someday.

Well, that day has finally come! It turns out those few lines of poetry are from a much longer poem by William Hayley titled, “The Triumphs of Temper.”

Hayley’s poem was a wildly popular best-seller during the 1790s. It centers on a young woman named Serena, whose favorite pastime is staying up all night reading novels!

Here are those intriguing lines on the postcard:

No one with her to cast a private glance,
O’er the dear pages of a new romance,
Eager in Fictions touching scenes to find
A field, to exercise her youthful mind;
The touching scenes new energy impress’d
On all the virtues of her feeling breast.

What makes this postcard so interesting to me is how it contrasts with Rev. James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women—that infamous and tedious book Mr. Collins insisted on reading aloud to the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice.

When I wrote my continuation, Mary and the Captain, I took some literary license and had Mary Bennet constantly reading and quoting from Fordyce’s book. She used his rules of conduct for women as a kind of social shield, memorizing his sermons without truly understanding how to apply them in real life. She agreed with Fordyce’s warning that novels would inflame a young woman’s imagination—until she read a novel for the first time and found herself enjoying it.

William Hayley, on the other hand, suggested a completely different set of rules of conduct for Regency women. While moralists like Fordyce condemned novels, Hayley argued Serena’s novel-reading habit was a positive force that taught emotional resilience and empathy.

That internal, heroic resilience is what I wanted to give Mary Bennet in her own story. She didn’t need to stop reading or change her studious nature to become a true Austen heroine; she just needed to put down the dry sermons, open her heart, and step out into the world. Luckily, she met a dashing young army captain who helped her do just that—by handing her his own copy of Robinson Crusoe, the very first novel Mary ever read!

You can find Mary and the Captain on Amazon here.

And you can read the first canto of Hayley’s “The Triumphs of Temper” here.