Gina Walker speaks with dedication and enthusiasm, with admirable narrative sense and a certain amount, inevitably, of didacticism. Speak with the same energy and passion of a novice researcher. As if it were still that young student who came to the University of New York rediscover chasing the dream of Jane Austen. Or not take many years to be one of the world’s leading specialists in the history and biography of women. I meet the Walker professor at the University of A Coruña, in the course of a seminar of international research led by Professor MJ Lorenzo Modia, professor of this institution, also dedicated years to the study of women and eighteenth century.

Walker , now at The New School, Jane Austen did not abandon, but ran smack into someone you might not expect: Mary Hays. This enigmatic and stubborn writer Walker became not only a student of his work, but a passionate advocate of the idea of freedom and equality in the Republic of Letters, against traditional masculinist discourse. “As a child I was very worried about the roles of cowboy movies. I never had girls with a starring role. And I wondered why,” he says. “I started reading books in my teens, I met the poet Sappho, who knew nothing of what I saw in one of his poems to his daughter Cleis.” Do not ask me what to wear “(do not ask me how dressed) says it should not take any adornment in the head, except fresh flowers. In the sixth century before Christ, no less, a woman spoke with her ​​daughter in these terms, [with this freedom]! Then came my interest by Jane Austen. I was told first that he could not work on it because I was all that. But I moved to New York University and there I stood before my tutor, Kenneth Neill Cameron (who later directed my thesis), and told the same thing. I wanted to investigate Austen I said yes, but asked me to go to the library and look what he had on Mary Hays, because, he insisted. “We know very little of it. ‘ The first book I found Hays was Female Biography . How boring is this be, I thought. I told the librarian that I wanted to find something on the own biography of Mary Hays. And the first thing I got was a page of Samuel T . Coleridge, in his letters, he wrote just after a meeting with her. “see something so ugly dress with petticoats it is something I can not stand,” it read in the paper So no, there was no biography of Mary Hays “he says, laughing.

Therefore, Gina Luria Walker Mary Hays found almost by accident. And Hays was the beginning of a researcher who would irrepressible passion, an investigation that has extended the lives of women, their social and intellectual relevance, as Hays made ​​with 302 female biographies that it seems Jane Austen he read to build the women in his novels. Walker was passionate in those early days, not knowing what would come to be in charge of the six-volume edition of Female Biography of Chawton House (one of the houses of Austen in England, turned into a prestigious center for researchers).
Walker went looking for evidence on the Hays unknown. “In 1925 he had published a collection of letters (for his relative Ann Wedd) especially love letters to a lover who died young,” Walker explains. “I came to the conclusion that someone must have those letters. I wrote to the six possible heirs, who found in the will of publishers. Until finally received a response, two months later, a Miss Jill Organ. Someone from London that promised to teach me something. I had never traveled so far. I’ve never crossed the Atlantic (laughs). I met Miss Organ and only last night agreed to teach promised. He knelt before her bed, pulled out from under her a small chest, and … there were letters. And a copy of the Vindication of the Rights of Women , Mary Wollstonecraft. The university decided to buy the cards. I was finishing my thesis, then. I did not have a context so fitting that she read everything, or Austen or Wollstonecraft, mentioned about women. It was an ambiguous, very controversial person. So I wanted to read everything, “she admits. Today, the passion for Hays eighteenth and women have led to the Walker professor of international prestige on the intellectual tradition of feminism. 165 researchers were recruited to build the admirable edition of Female Biography to Chawton. Today he heads the project continues, a fileonline dedicated to biographies of women recognized in history as important figures in the feminist tradition.