Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood

If asked to supply a pertinent example of each genre of Eliza Haywood's writing, what would you choose? Haywood was an amatory novelist, poet, translator, playwright, journalist, political satirist, conduct book writer, periodical writer and domestic novelist, writing more than 72 works over four decades. Many of her texts are now available in modern editions: Love in Excess, The Injur'd Husband, The City Jilt, Eovaai, Betsy Thoughtless, to name only a few. But what if your goal was to offer an introductory anthology of her many different styles of work? Paula Backscheider tackles just such a problem. In her edition of selections from the very large canon of Eliza Haywood, we are given two plays and two novellas in their entirety, and excerpts from four other texts-excerpts ranging from teasing tidbits to fair-sized samples. Backscheider explains that her choices are based upon giving "a representative selection of most of the forms [Haywood] used and from every decade of her career" (though she leaves out the 1740s). This edition, used in conjunction with other available texts, should allow us "to see how incomplete our understanding of [Haywood's] work is and …begin to address our limitations" (xxxvi). Selected Fiction and Drama certainly does introduce us to several of the many genres of this talented author and promises to stimulate new studies.

A Wife to be Lett (1724), Haywood's first original play, begins the anthology. Haywood starred as the heroine, Mrs. Graspall, the wife supposedly rented out to a lover by her miserly husband. The wife-pandering plot is probably heavily influenced by Aphra Behn's The Luckey Chance (1686), and the subplot, describing how a wealthy widow is tricked into marrying a disguised servant, is reminiscent of Congreve's The Way of the World (1700). Backscheider tells us "the play is filled with action, interesting characters, and Haywood's themes and opinions" (xxxvii), but she does not elaborate. Readers can discover for themselves how Haywood portrays marriage as a dangerous venture for all women, and they can appreciate the irony of her happy ending demonstrating the moral influence of a good wife.

The 1726 novels, The City Jilt and The Mercenary Lover come next and are "among Haywood's most shocking ….[B]oth belong to a fairly large group of revenge fantasies" (xxxvii)-but whether this group is comprised of Haywood's works or of eighteenth-century women writers' in general is not specified. Although The City Jilt's plot of the seduced and abandoned Glicera transforming herself into a female nemesis on the male sex is obviously a revenge fantasy, it is unclear how The Mercenary Lover fits this category. Clitander marries Miranda, but in order to secure her sister Althea's fortune too, he seduces her and plots her murder. But the death of Althea, pregnant and poisoned by Clitander's hand, receives no vengeance. Her sister, discovering her husband's guilt, does not prosecute him but rather keeps the letters he sent Althea to arm herself against his artifices. Both novels do fit Backscheider's broad claim that "the assumption and values of a commodity culture undergird all of Haywood's writings. Everything has market value, especially women.…[A]n innocent woman who believes she is a person is taught that she is merely a sign, a representation of her economic value" (xxxii).

The Opera of Operas; or Tom Thumb the Great (1733) is the last complete work offered here. The introduction helpfully situates the play within its contemporary political and literary frameworks, particularly with respect to Henry Fielding's two earlier versions of it. The text, we are told, "is very close to that of Fielding's play" although "innumerable minor revisions in his lines…have been made" (xxxix). Backscheider does not explain the effect or purpose of those revisions. Hints in the footnotes may implicitly encourage readers to pursue an investigation of Haywood's political purpose, but they do not offer much assistance. The cryptic note on page 175 about Queen Caroline's Richmond monument and Merlin serves as a good example. The significance of this note is unclear unless the reader is familiar with Backscheider's 1998 article in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. The aim of the Women Writers Series may be to keep these texts relatively unhampered to encourage work on them; however, a scholar of Backscheider's reputation can afford to be more generous with her knowledge.

Particularly exciting about this edition are the excerpts from those genres for which Haywood is not yet famous. The Fruitless Enquiry (1727) consists of Decameron-like tales from a feminine perspective; The Invisible Spy (1755) are stories related by Exploralibus who, with a belt of invisibility and a magical tablet that receives the imprints of spoken words, is able to eavesdrop and spy; and the conduct book, The Wife (1756) advises that "as law and custom have given the superiority to the men, it is doubtless the duty as well as interest of every wife…to be constantly assiduous" to watch over her husband's temper and her own actions (302). Backscheider also includes two sections from the political satire, Adventures of Eovaai (1736) including the king's philosophy of good monarchy, and the princess's destruction of the evil magician's (Sir Robert Walpole's) magic wand. Backscheider's introduction tells us that the four excerpted works are evidence of Haywood's "experimentation with the power of print" (xliv), but again, little more is offered. Three of the eight and a half pages devoted to introducing "This Volume's Selections" are about the Elizabeth Canning phenomenon, a case referred to in one of The Invisible Spy selections. When only one paragraph is given to A Wife to be Lett, two paragraphs to Eovaai (neither addressing Haywood's maze of footnotes that challenge perceptions of print), and many statements in the introduction are either vague or broad generalizations, the attention given to the Canning case represents a flaw in proportion.

The general editors of the Women Writers series mention in their Foreword that their editions are "aimed at a wide audience, from the informed undergraduate through professional students of literature-and … the general reader" (x). Backscheider's edition adheres to this mandate, being lightly annotated, glossing unfamiliar words and identifying historical persons and literary allusions. Her introduction is divided into sections dealing with "The Life," "Career," "Contributions" (to the novel as a genre), "This Volume's Selections" and a "Selected Bibliography." We learn factoids about those to whom Haywood dedicated particular works-Sarah Churchill, Viscount Thomas Gage, William Yonge, and others; her literary circle, publishers and associates. The introduction tackles Haywood's lengthy career by decade, summing up each one neatly. For instance, "the magic decade of the 1720s" (xxxvii) is described as one in which "the ideology of heterosexual love and notions of happiness are displaced, deconstructed, and finally, … reinserted" (xxiii). Backscheider uses that "magic decade" phrase again (xxii), but she never specifies what makes it so magical-the sheer volume of publications, the popular success of them, the variety of genres, or a combination of all? The "Contributions" section is the most interesting as it investigates Haywood as "the epitome of the novel" until 1740 (xxix). A brief overview of scholars reinterpreting the history of the novel leads the reader to consider where and how Haywood fits in. Her experimentation with genre, structure, and character doubling are mentioned, as well as the popular theme of how novel reading is portrayed as dangerous even within Haywood's own novels.

I found seven typographical errors in the edition (including two misspellings of Eovaai as Eovaii) and constant references to The Adventures of Eovaai). The running title Fiction and Drama of Elizabeth Haywood made me wonder whether this was an error or a conscious bid to introduce the name change. For the footnotes on page 130 in The Mercenary Lover, I would think that some reference to Ovid and Rochester as authors of erotic, even pornographic poetry might be in order to explain Clitander's corruption of Althea through literature. Ovid should be identified as the author of the Ars Amatoria rather than the Metamorphoses in relation to this part of the novel. And the reference to Rochester kidnapping and marrying an heiress is oddly irrelevant in this context.

Overall, Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood is a competent edition of some works not yet widely available and therefore will be welcomed by readers hungry to acquire more Haywood in modern editions. It will serve as a good introductory sampler of Haywood for undergraduate and general readers. The range of selections may encourage some to address the limitations of their understanding of Haywood's work as it offers her as an author of wide interests and many genres. Backscheider presents Haywood's lengthy career as an "important example of an early modern woman writer's navigation and reception in the [print] world" (xxix), but she seems to feel that simply making these works available is enough. For all of her recent pleas that Haywood critics step up their efforts on the individual works, Backscheider seems content with this edition to rally the troops rather than lead them.