Eliza Haywood

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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.
Black and white engraving of Eliza Haywood by George Vertue after a painting by James Parmentier. It has an oval frame tied with a ribbon at the top and set within a rectangular from. Haywood's hair is tied back, with a lock of it showing on her left shoulder. She is wearing a dress with a deep decolletage and lace at the bosom. This engraving was used as frontispiece to vol. i of her "Secret Histories, Novels and Poems", of which the second (and perhaps only) edition appeared in 1725.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Elizabeth Boyd
She dedicated it to her patron Lady Hertford . The British Library copy is 12604 ccc. 7. Harvard University holds the only known copy of an undated set of subscription proposals, which is headed Any...
Textual Production Anne-Thérèse de Lambert
The letters to both children were probably written in the last decade of the seventeenth century, and were said to be influenced by the writings of Louis Silvestre de Sacy . The translator into English...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay , she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jane Brereton
The book opens, like other posthumous collections, with a biographical memoir, in this case by JB 's daughter Charlotte, who reinforces the poet's own positioning of herself as Welsh, female, and modest. Envisaging potential hostility...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Martha Fowke
This book takes the form of an autobiographical love-letter to Hillario (Aaron Hill , to whom there is a verse dedication as well), but it is also, as its title implies, a satirical fiction...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The significance of this field of study is not so much that RPJ later wrote short stories herself, as that many or most of her chosen texts (later re-classified by literary historians as novels, despite...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Alethea Lewis
She heads her novel with a prefatory letter to the Rev. William Johnstone , who, she says, has asked why she chooses to write fiction and not moral essays. She answers that novels offer opportunities...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Masters
A few of the letters discuss female friendship and feminist opinion, as if seeking to raise the consciousness of the recipient. Some in this category occur at random among other letters. Most treat topics of...

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