Eliza Haywood
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Eliza Haywood (1693 - February 25, 1756) (born Elizabeth Fowler) was a British novelist, actress, playwright, poet, essayist, and translator.
She was probably born in Shropshire and married, and widowed, very young. Her first entry into the public record is in 1714 in Dublin, Ireland, and she was already then "Mrs. Haywood." Haywood was an important voice in periodical literature in the 18th century in the Kingdom of Great Britain, as well as a notable voice for the stage. In her own day, she was a wit and a professional writer and actress, but she is studied today primarily as a novelist. Her novels are a stylistic bridge between the earlier fictions of Aphra Behn and, to some degree, Daniel Defoe, and the later novels of feminine peril and marital negotiation.
Acting and drama
Haywood began her acting career in 1715 in Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. By 1717, she had moved to Lincoln's Inn Fields, where she worked for John Rich. By 1721, she began to write prose fiction with Love in Excess, which has a romantic, erotic plot with a woman in danger of a seducer. The same year, Rich had her rewrite a play called The Fair Captive. The play only ran for three nights (to the author's benefit), but Rich added a fourth night as a benefit for the second author, Haywood. In 1724, after selling several novels (see below), Haywood authored her first play, A Wife to be Lett.
During the second half of the 1720s, Haywood continued acting, and she moved over to the Haymarket Theatre to join with Henry Fielding in the opposition plays of the 1730s. In 1729, she wrote Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh to honor the future George II of the United Kingdom. George II, as Prince of Wales, was a locus for Tory opposition to the ministry of Robert Walpole. As he had made it clear that he did not favor his father's policies or ministry, praise for him was demurral from the present king. Others, such as James Thomson and Henry Brooke, were also writing such "patriotic" (which is to say in support of the Patriot Whigs) plays at the time, and Henry Carey was soon to satirize the failed promise of George II.
Haywood's greatest success at Haymarket came with The Opera of Opera, an operatic adaptation of Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies (with music by J. F. Lampe and Thomas Arne) in 1733. However, it was an adaptation with a distinct difference. Caroline of Ansbach had affected a reconciliation between George I and George II, and this meant an endorsement by George II of the Whig ministry. Haywood's adaptation contains a reconciliation scene, replete with symbols from Caroline's own grotto. This was an enunciation of a change by Haywood herself away from any Tory, or anti-Walpolean, causes that she had supported previously, and it did not go unnoticed by her contemporaries.
In 1735, she wrote a one-volume Companion to the Theatre. This book contains plot summaries of contemporary plays, literary criticism, and dramaturgical observations. In 1747 she added a second volume.
After the Licensing Act of 1737, the playhouse was shut against adventurous new plays.
Political journalism
Eliza Haywood was active in politics during her entire career, although she had a party change around the time of the reconciliation of George II with Robert Walpole. She wrote a series of parallel histories, beginning with 1724's Memoirs of a Certain Island, Adjacent to Utopia, and then The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania in 1727. Her greatest success, however, was the Female Spectator, which began in 1744 and continued for many years. In 1746 her started another journal, The Parrot, which got her questioned by the government for political statements about Charles Edward Stuart, as she was writing just after the Jacobite Rising. This would happen again with the publication of A Letter from H-- G----g, Esq. in 1750. She grew more directly political with The Invisible Spy in 1755 and The Wife in 1756.
She also performed translation work, beginning with La belle assemblee in 1724 and on to Memoirs of a Man of Honour in 1747.
Novels
Haywood wrote novels from the very beginning of her career and continued writing them to the end of her life. Her novels sometimes ran to multiple volumes (as with Love in Excess). Part of this would have been due to the economy of book publishing, as authors were paid only once for a book and received no royalties. Therefore, a second volume would mean a second payment. Her early novels include:- The British Recluse 1722 (two narratives of women facing seducers; one is despoiled, and the other escapes);
- The Injur'd Husband 1723
- Idalia, or, The Unfortunate Mistress 1723
- The Rash Resolve 1724
- The Masqueraders 1724
- Fantomina, or, Love in a Maze 1725
- The Mercenary Lover 1726
- The City Jilt 1726
- Philidore and Placentia 1727 (a travel narrative)
- ''The Fruitless Inquiry 1727.
In the 1740s Haywood's political change shows in her novels. She joined with Henry Fielding in the satirizing of Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded by writing Anti-Pamela, or, Feign'd Innocence Detected in 1741 and A Present for a Servant-Maid, or, The Sure Means of Gaining Love and Esteem in 1743. These novels make fun of the idea of bargaining one's maidenhead for a place in society, and they follow Fielding's own lead in that satire. In 1744, she wrote The Fortunate Foundlings. It is essentially a picaresque novel, where two children, a boy and a girl, go through the courts and places of contemporary Europe, and their experiences and sensations of the world differ along the lines of their gender roles. Her most famous novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, appeared in 1751, and she wrote The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy in 1753. Like The Fortunate Foundlings and later novels (like Smollett's Humphry Clinker), it tells of the same events from separate points of view.
Betsy Thoughtless was an important change in the novel in the 18th century. It tells of a mistaken but intelligent and strong-willed woman who gives way to society's pressures in marriage, to her edification and reward. According to Backscheider, it creates the novel of marriage, rather than the novel of courtship, and it foreshadows the type of domestic novel that would culminate in Jane Eyre. Instead of concerning itself with wooing well, it is concerned with marrying well, and its heroine learns that giving way to the role of women in marriage is fulfilling.
Last years
Haywood continued working at her writing until her death, and she wrote of her final illness in her weekly journal. She grew ill in October of 1755 and died on February 25, 1756. She was buried in Westminster.Cultural context
Her contemporaries regarded Haywood as neither remarkable for being a woman nor for being salacious. Alexander Pope made her a centerpoint in the heroic games of The Dunciad in Book II. She is, in Pope's view, vacuous. He does not dismiss her for being a woman, although he does make fun of her physique, but for having nothing of her own to say. If she had been regarded as shocking for being a woman or for being obscene, Pope would likely have made use of it. Instead, he attacks her for politics and for, implicitly, plagiarism.
Unlike other "dunces," however, Pope's characterization does not seem to have been the cause of her obscurity. Rather, as literary historians came to praise and value the masculine novel and, most importantly, to dismiss the courtship novel and to exclude novels of eroticism, Haywood's works were rejected for more chaste or more overtly philosophical works.
Eliza Haywood never remarried, but she did not remain alone. She had two children. The first was probably fathered by Richard Savage, and the second was fathered by Hatchett, with whom she lived openly for decades.
In The Dunciad, the book sellers race each other to reach Eliza, and their reward will be all of her books and her company. She is for sale, in other words, in literature and society, in Pope's view. As with other "dunces," she was not without complicity in the attack. Haywood had begun to make it known that she was poor and in need of funds, and she seemed to be writing for pay and to please the undiscerning public.
Eliza Haywood is now regarded as "a case study in the politics of literary history" (Backscheider 100). She is also being reevaluated by feminist scholars and rated very highly. Her novels, voluminous and frequent, are now regarded as stylistically innovative and important transitions from the erotic seduction novels and poetry of Aphra Behn (particularly Love Letters between a Noble Man and His Sister (1685)) and the straightforward, plainly spoken novel of Frances Burney. In her own day, her plays and political writing attracted the most comment and attention, and thus she was a full player in the difficult public sphere, but today her novels carry the most interest and demonstrate the most significant innovation.
References
- Backscheider, Paula R. "Eliza Haywood." In Matthew, H.C.G. and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 26, 97-100. London: OUP, 2004.
- Spedding, Patrick. A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004.
External links
- [E-text of Fantomina, or, Love in a Maze]
- [E-text of Idalia, or, the Unfortunate Mistress]
- [E-text of The Fatal Secret, or, Constancy in Distress]
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