The Female Spectator and the New Story of Eliza Haywood

Actress. Scandalous Woman. Professional Author. Creator of titillating secret histories. Female spectator. Conventional, conduct-book novelist. Eliza Haywood's various eighteenth-century refashionings are now well known. Most Haywood scholars have imagined her career in two halves, abruptly broken by a transformation. In the standard narrative of her career, she moves from portraying the protofeminist scandalous women of amatory fiction as in Fantomina to producing the heavy-handed didacticism of her later conduct-book novels like The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Depending on the particular critical perspective, this shift is either framed as a moral one—she reforms and realizes the wrongs of her scandalous ways—or as a shrewd, financial one—she realizes the realities of the changing, post-Pamela fiction marketplace for virtuous heroines and changes her style accordingly.¹ This two-part career has been a way to describe what Paula Backsheider calls Haywood's "Story" for the last two centuries.² But the last decade has seen an attempt to refashion the meaning—and even existence—of her supposed transformation. Kirsten Saxton's introduction to the first book-length critical study of Haywood, published in 2000, is typical of this new approach: Saxton argues "that neither extreme was simply the case. . . . In fact, in the 1740s and 50s, Haywood continued to explore the themes of gender, party politics, and power in formally innovative prose that responded to shifts in narrative style and structure afoot in the Augustan literary arena" (9). The new critical story accounts for changes in Haywood's style by emphasizing her innovation and involvement in the novel's early history as one of the first novelists. Many of the new stories being formed about Haywood's career call attention to the fact that she continues to write, but just not as a novelist, during the period in which she supposedly disappears and then returns reformed. The recovery of her prolific work in other genres can reveal previously obscured continuities and connections, and The Female Spectator has a special role in this project, not least because it appears from 1744 through 1746, just a few years after the publication of Richardson's Pamela, after Haywood is supposedly silenced by Pope's ridicule of her in The Dunciad, and before some of her most well-known, "moral" fiction.

This recent collection of essays edited by Donald J. Newman and Lynn Marie Wright, Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and "The Female Spectator," is the first book-length publication on The Female Spectator and makes a case for continuity across her career. Further, these essays are partly intended to unsettle the assumption that The Female Spectator is a conservative periodical as regards gender ideology and that it is part of the supposedly conservative later work of Haywood. Because The Female Spectator is often seen as the turning point in her career, examination of this journal can play a special role in revising Backscheider's story of Haywood's mid-career transformation. By connecting The Female Spectator both to earlier and to later Haywood texts and by recontextualizing it historically, culturally, and even materially, these essays open up interesting new ways of looking at Haywood's career. Furthermore, they contribute in general to cultural studies of the period and shed light on how genres inform and are informed by the early novel.

As Wright and Newman point out in their introduction, the time is ripe for more attention to be paid to Haywood's work as a journalist; until recently, "the scholarly attractions of her fiction have pushed The Female Spectator and her other miscellaneous writings to the periphery of her oeuvre" (20). Her prolixity and interest as a novelist may have led us to ignore her periodical. Wright and Newman rightly emphasize the special relationship between her work as journalist and novelist, and The Female Spectator can help bridge the gap between the two, especially because of the ways narrative is layered upon narrative...