The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood

Abstract

ELIZA Haywood's life 13 romance like ' ' Love in Excess ' ' and the ' ' exemplary novels ' ' just mentioned. These exercises in fiction were evidently composed currente calamo, with little thought and less revision, for an eager and undiscriminating public. Possibly, as Mr. Gosse conjectures,^" they were read chiefly by milliners and other women on the verge of literacy. But though persons of solid education avoided reading novels and eastern tales as they might the drinking of drams, it is certain that no one of scanty means could have afforded Mrs. Haywood's slender octavos at the price of one to three shillings. The Lady's Library ("Spectator" No. 37) containing beside numerous romances "A Book of Novels" and "The New Atalantis, with a Key to it," which last Lady Mary Montagu also enjoyed, and the dissolute countrygentleman's daughters ("Spectator" No. 128) who "read Volumes of Love-Letters and Romances to their Mother," a ci-devant coquette, give us perhaps a more accurate idea of the woman novelist's public. Doubtless Mrs. Haywood's Progress of Bomance, I, 121, however, gives 1758, while Mrs. Griffith, Collection of Novels (1777), II, 159, prefers 1759. The two novels were Clementina (1768), a revision of The Agreeable Caledonian, and The History of Leonora Meadowson (1788).

Eliza Haywood’s Empathy: Creating a Narrative Discourse of Her Own

“…She would impress any contemporary author by the number of her writings in a variety of genres -prose fiction, drama, poetry, translation, and other fictions, with her only exception being autobiography. It should be noted that in the first descriptive bibliography George Whicher (1915) listed 67 literary works authored by her. Later, Dale Spender (1986) Idalia, Or, The Unfortunate Mistress belongs to a formulaic genre traditionally defined in literary criticism as amatory fiction -"a particular body of narrative fiction by women which was explicitly erotic in its concentration on the representation of sentimental love" (Ballaster 1992, p. 31).…”