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“Will be required reading not just for students of eighteenth-century literature but also for feminist critics and historians of the novel.” —Sandra M. Gilbert, award-winning poet and literary critic The most prolific woman writer of the eighteenth century, Eliza Haywood (1693–1756?) was a key player in the history of the English novel. Along with her contemporary Defoe, she did more than any other writer to create a market for fiction prior to the emergence of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. Also one of Augustan England’s most popular authors, Haywood came to fame in 1719 with the publication of her first novel, Love in Excess. In addition to writing fiction, she was a playwri...
This edition provides representative texts from Eliza Haywood's career, which overlaps that of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. The six fictions and two plays provided here illustrate the many kinds of writing she produced, and the ways she treated important themes and issues.
While under arrest in 1750 on suspicion of producing a seditious pamphlet Eliza Haywood insisted she ‘never wrote any thing in a political way’. This study of the life and works, the first full-length biography of Haywood in nearly a century, takes the measure of her duplicity.
Eliza Haywood was one of the most prolific English writers in the Age of the Enlightenment. Her career, from Love in Excess (1719) to her last completed project The Invisible Spy (1755) spanned the gamut of genres: novels, plays, advice manuals, periodicals, propaganda, satire, and translations. Haywood’s importance in the development of the novel is now well-known. A Spy on Eliza Haywood links this with her work in the other genres in which she published at least one volume a year throughout her life, demonstrating how she contributed substantially to making women’s writing a locus of debate that had to be taken seriously by contemporary readers, as well as now by current scholars of political, moral, and social enquiries into the eighteenth century. Haywood’s work is essential to the study of eighteenth-century literature and this collection of essays continues the growing scholarship on this most important of women writers.
Most critics will acknowledge the enormous contributions Eliza Haywood made towards the development of the novel, but are often silent about her shorter fiction. Included in this volume are four of her most notable shorter pieces: "The British Recluse" (1722), "Fantomina" (1724), "The Fatal Secret" (1724), and "The City Jilt" (1726).
Although Mrs. Haywood was evidently not responsible for the inclusion of her tale in "The Female Dunciad," and although the piece itself was entirely innocuous, her daring to raise her head even by accident brought down upon her another scurrilous rebuke, not this time from the poet himself, but from her former admirer, Richard Savage.
This text reprints selected non-fictional works by Haywood, with particular attention to the journalism, criticism, and "conduct and advice" material. Here, Haywood explicates and defends ideas on gender and culture that she develops obliquely elsewhere.
Love in Excess (1719-1720) is a novel by Eliza Haywood. Published in three parts by printer William Chetwood, the novel marked Haywood' debut on the London literary scene. It was an immediate bestseller, going through several reprintings in Haywood's lifetime. Love in Excess is considered a prime example of the popular genre of amatory fiction, which often used love triangles to expose the imbalance between male and female desire in a patriarchal society. Like all young aristocratic women of their time, Alovisa and Amena are expected to wait for a marriage proposal to fall into their laps. Forbidden from expressing her desires, Alovisa decides to send an anonymous letter to the handsome, rak...