The Shadow of an Author: Eliza Haywood

The Shadow of an Author: Eliza Haywood Paula R. Backscheider Eliza Haywood's opening of The Invisible Spy (1755) taunts the reader: "I have observed, that when a new book begins to make a noise in the world ... every one is desirous ofbecoming acquainted with the author; and this impatience increases the more he endeavors to conceal himself. ... but whether I am even a man or a woman, they will find it, after all their conjectures, as difficult to discover as the longitude." Not only does this passage raise topics that Haywood's time and our own have been obsessively interested in—authorship and gender—but two of Haywood's professional and personal interests—current events and science—leave their traces on this sentence. The Longitude Act of 1714 had offered a huge prize, £20,000, forthe person who figured out a "practical" way to calculate longitude to within half a degree of the great circle (and prize money on a sliding scale down to £10,000 for a calculation within one degree). Latitude is easily calculated by the sun or stars, but, regardless of where the prime meridian is placed, longitude can only be determinedby exacttime-keeping by an instrument unaffected by the motion of the water. John Harrison, an English watchmaker, successfully created a marine chronometer in 1735, but the scientific community forced trial after trial of it. The size of the prize and the controversy kept longitude in the news.' 1 Ptolemy plotted latitude and longitude onhis atlas, buthis prime meridian, the zero degree longitude line, was moved numerous times; mapmakers located it in Rome, St Petersburg, Paris, London, and EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 1, October 1998 80 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION The opening quotation also suggests the difficulties of working with Eliza Haywood's texts. She creates exceptionally complex narrators and narrative perspectives, and there always seems to be more in her writing than even the most experienced interpreter sees. Her topical allusions are myriad, her engagement with political and social issues continuous, and her fictions complex and subtle. Just before this passage from The Invisible Spy, she anticipates her reception: "I expect to hear an hundred different names inscribed to the Invisible,—some of which I should, perhaps , be proud of, others as much ashamed to own.—Some will doubtless take me for a philosopher,—others for a fool;—with some I shall pass for a man of pleasure,—with others for a stoic;—some will look upon me as a courtier,—others as a patriot." And so indeed and still today do readers and critics label her and her narrators. As is clear from recent descriptions , debate continues about whether her novels are shallow, trivial, and repetitious, whether they provide important social commentary or are an important part of the literary history of the novel, and whether Haywood is an erotic writer producing (knowingly or not) arousal literature and pleasure machines or a skilful social allegorist or an important literary innovator. Whatever our opinions, however, it seems indisputable to me that she has come to stand for the nexus and the point of tension between a number of things—the transgressive, outspoken woman and the moral, admonishing woman writer, between amatory fiction and the new novel. As seems appropriate for an essay today on Haywood, mine is more about difficulties than certainties, more about reactions than interpretations, and more about the state of Haywood criticism—and by extension criticism ofthe eighteenth-century novel—than about understanding a coherent group of her texts. The "story" ofthe history ofthe English novel has broken down, and we are working amid competing histories of the form. In the introduction to a recent anthology, John Richetti and I took many of them into account. We point out: "According to this story, in place of the faceless, formulaic repetitions of booksellers' hacks and financially distressed female authors"; even Philadelphia before it was fixed in Greenwich in 1884. Harrison was eventually awarded the prize he deserved in 1773. See Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story ofa Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem ofHis Time (New York: Walker Publishing Company, 1995). Eliza Haywood's interest in science is evident...