Eliza Haywood

01 December 1692 - 25 February 1756

Standard Name: Haywood, Eliza

Birth Name: Elizabeth Fowler

Married Name: Eliza Haywood

Pseudonym: A Young Lady

Pseudonym: Mira

Pseudonym: Euphrosine

Pseudonym: The Authors of the Female Spectator

Pseudonym: The Author of the Fortunate Foundlings

Pseudonym: Exploralibus

Pseudonym: The Son of a Mandarin, residing in London

EH was the most prolific novelist by number of titles (even ignoring those doubtfully ascribed) between Aphra Behn and Charlotte Smith . She also wrote poems, plays, periodicals, conduct books, translation, and theatre history. Her output of 72 works and four collections (actual or planned) skews all graphs of the rising output of published works by women. Some readers find the endless, breathless sex scenes of her earlier fiction tedious; but behind the sensationalism is a sharp mind. She is hilariously satirical, pointedly topical, formally inventive and experimental, and trenchantly critical of power misused (in both political and gender relations). Her career shows a certain direction as well as a constant opportunism. The varied origins of the novel gave her scope for original hybridizations of the pliable new form. Her Betsy Thoughtless first brought to the post-Richardsonian novel a female viewpoint unmonitored by male mentors. Her Female Spectator was the first woman's work in the new magazine genre.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Education	Elizabeth Boyd	EB says nothing about how she learned the things she knew—an acquaintance with English literature, some history, and at least a smattering of French and Latin—but she may well have been largely self-taught. She often...
Family and Intimate relationships	William Congreve	Congreve's daughter therefore grew up with the name and identity of Mary Godolphin , from her supposed and legal father. (Henrietta's title, held in her own right of descent from her famous father, was not...
Family and Intimate relationships	Selina Davenport	Her father, Captain Charles Granville Wheler , was a great-nephew of Sir George Wheler , a traveller, clergyman, scholar, and early member of the Royal Society , who had a family estate in Kent. (...
Family and Intimate relationships	Dorothea Du Bois	This most sensational trial of the mid-century was reported in detail by the Gentleman's Magazine the following year, and used in more or less avowed fictions by Eliza Haywood in Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young...
Family and Intimate relationships	Dorothea Du Bois	DDB 's family was, it appears, distantly related to that of Eliza Haywood . Spedding, Patrick. A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. Pickering and Chatto, 2003. 384
Friends, Associates	Martha Fowke	She formed close links with a group of male poets who held opposition political views: James Thomson , Aaron Hill (who was corresponding with her by June 1721), Richard Savage (with whom she was exchanging...
Friends, Associates	Alexander Pope	Pope's relationships with women, particularly women who wrote, tended to be complicated and turbulent. They have been ably studied by scholar Valerie Rumbold . Contrary to rumour, he apparently liked and respected Anne Finch ...
Friends, Associates	Susanna Centlivre	In the 1720s she belonged to an informal literary club which included Anthony Hammond (with whom she was supposed to have had her most youthful liaison), Ambrose Philips , Martha Fowke , and Eliza Haywood . Bowyer, John Wilson. The Celebrated Mrs Centlivre. Duke University Press, 1952. 229-30
Friends, Associates	Jonathan Swift	Swift helped and befriended a number of women writers. He was a patron of Mary Barber , Constantia Grierson , an unidentified Mrs Sican , Mary Davys , and Laetitia Pilkington , a colleague of...
Intertextuality and Influence	Lady Mary Wortley Montagu	The emotional outpouring of the early letters sounds unmediated; yet they are modelled on a style used in epistolary fiction by Behn and Haywood .
Intertextuality and Influence	Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan	She here turns to use some of the research she had done with the intention of writing a non-fictional study of Belgium (only recently constituted as a nation) and its politics, and a guide-book element...
Intertextuality and Influence	Sarah Murray	The first anecdote about the girls is sentimental in tone. The sweet and lovely Miss Menil reforms the eleven-year-old malicious telltale Miss Cummings by taking her part when she has done wrong. Miss Cummings, filled...
Intertextuality and Influence	Laetitia Pilkington	LP was vividly aware of the literary handicap represented by her gender. But she was choosy about claiming influence. She decried Manley , Haywood , and Mary Barber (whose poems, she says, would have been...
Intertextuality and Influence	Frances Brooke	Mary Singleton, supposed author of this paper, with its trenchant comments on society and politics, is an unmarried woman on the verge of fifty, McMullen, Lorraine. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. University of British Columbia Press, 1983. 14 good-humoured as well as sharply intelligent: a contribution to the...
Intertextuality and Influence	Catherine Hutton	Jane Oakwood says (presumably standing in for her author, as she often does) that in youth she was accused of imitating Juliet, Lady Catesby (Frances Brooke 's translation from Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni ). Hutton, Catherine. Oakwood Hall. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819. 3: 95

Timeline

3 April 1592

The early, anonymous tragedyArden of Feversham was entered in the Stationers' Register ; the title character is murdered by his adulterous wife.

1669

G. J. Guilleragues published, anonymously, Lettres portugaises (sometimes called Letters of a Portuguese Nun).

19 May 1720

A New Miscellany, edited by Anthony Hammond , included work by Pope , Prior , William Bond , George Sewell , Susanna Centlivre , Delarivier Manley , Eliza Haywood , Martha Fowke , and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu .

29 February 1724

Daniel Defoe anonymously published The Fortunate Mistress, or . . . Lady Roxana, his second fictional autobiography of a woman living on her wits.

February 1726

Richard Savage published his Miscellaneous Poems and Translations: dedicated to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , it included work by Eliza Haywood , Martha Fowke , and Miranda Hill .

December 1728

George II 's eldest son, then Frederick Augustus, Prince of Brunswick-Lunenburg , arrived in England for the first time.

27 April 1736

Frederick Prince of Wales married Princess Augusta , who had first met him two days before, when she landed in England.

19 February 1747

Mrs Penelope Pry (possibly though not probably Eliza Haywood ) edited the only surviving issue of The Lady's Weekly Magazine, published in London.

1 January 1753

According to her own story, Elizabeth Canning , a maidservant, was abducted, after which she was imprisoned for days.

1754

The Rev. William Dodd published his novelThe Sisters; or, The History of Lucy and Caroline Sanson, Entrusted to a False Friend, a morally oversimplified example of the bad-sister-damned/good-sister-saved plot.

1 November 1755

A major earthquake at Lisbon in Portugal killed more than 10,000 people (estimates vary), provoking theological debate between Rousseau and Voltaire about the nature of evil.

1780

James Harrison (hitherto chiefly known as a music publisher) began to issue the handsomely-produced Novelists' Magazine, a weekly serial reprinting of canonical novels.

1814

John Colin Dunlop published The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age.

27 September 1968

The tribal love-rock musicalHair, a few months into its four-year run on Broadway, opened in London the day after censorship was ended by the Theatres Act.