Hays was influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman", and after writing admiringly to her, the two women became friends. The backlash following Wollstonecraft's death and posthumous publication of her "Memoirs" impacted Hays' later work, which some scholars have called more conservative. Among these later productions is the six-volume compendium "", in which Wollstonecraft is not mentioned, although Hays had written an extensive obituary for "The Annual Necrology" shortly after Godwin's controversial "Memoirs". If Wollstonecraft was neglected through the nineteenth century, Hays and her writing received even less critical evaluation or academic attention until the twentieth-century's emerging feminist movement.