“Fantomina” and Other Works by Eliza Haywood, and: Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators by Juliette Merritt

143 edition of Centlivre’s The Wonder makes accessible one of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century. The melancholy woman illustrated on the cover (repressing a secret?) does not reflect the play’s spirited heroines. In preserving the script’s rhetorical punctuation, Mr. O’Brien emphasizesthe oral effect of this fast paced and popular comedy. By contrast, the full translations into Standard English of Gibby’s Scots flatten thereader’sexperienceofthecharacter ’s voice. Although the notes are necessarily much briefer here than those in the Pickering and Chatto edition, the inclusion of Garrick’s alterations to Act 5 shows how the play was performed later in the century. The careful textual notes, appearing after the Epilogue, would be more useful with the addition of line numbers in the text. Having chosen as his copy-text the 1714 first edition, Mr. O’Brien silently suppresses from his title page the attribution, ‘‘Written by the Author of The Gamester,’’foundinthecopytext . Appearing alongside a signed dedication , this contradictory gesture toward anonymity on the title page deservesconsideration . Leaving open the question of whether The Wonder ‘‘critiques or ultimately accedes to the still largely patriarchalnorms of its culture,’’ Mr. O’Brien’s Introduction outlines the play’s long performance history and Centlivre’s biography. He stresses its significance for Centlivre’s Whig politics but treats with sanguinenaivete ́ the politics of the representation of Gibby, the Scots-speaking servant to Colonel Britton, also a Scot but who speaks English exclusively. If Gibby ‘‘serves to mark the full inclusionofScottish subjects into the recently-invented United Kingdom,’’ he is also marginalized as the quaint, infantilized colonial subject whose dialect is opaque to a passing English soldier while being perfectly comprehensible to the Portuguese characters . In contrast to the obsequious Vasquez , Gibby expresses his commitment ‘‘to freedom and liberty,’’ but his language is further colonized by the copious translations at the bottom of the page. Kathleen James-Cavan University of Saskatchewan ELIZA HAYWOOD. ‘‘Fantomina’’andOther Works, ed. Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias.Peterborough , ONT: Broadview, 2004. Pp. 288. $15.95. JULIETTE MERRITT. Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators. Toronto : Toronto, 2004. Pp. 190. $45. Almost single-handedly, Haywoodhas come to figure the thematicandcanonical possibilities of the ‘‘new’’ eighteenth century. These two books affirm the inexhaustible critical fascination of Haywood ’s Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725). Mr. Pettit, Ms. Croskery, and Ms. Patchias’s ‘‘Fantomina’’and OtherWorks reprints this story of a woman whose disguises serially seduce one inconstant rake, alongside three other Haywoodian texts devoted to the physical and moral operations of love: The Tea-Table (1725), Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), and Love-Letters on All Occasions (1730). These generically various works imagine narrative permutations of betrayed, decayed, and forced passion, turning upon the doubled fatality of ‘‘That Winter of Indifference and Neglect , which rarely, if ever, fails to succeed the sultry Summer of too fierce Desire in Man’sunconstantHeart’’and‘‘that sweet Destroyer, that stealing Poyson of a Woman’s Peace, [which] diffus’d it self 144 through all the Veins of theunexperienc’d Maid.’’ By placing Fantomina among Haywood’s lesser-known representations of ‘‘that sweetDestroyer,’’theeditorscrucially illuminate Fantomina’s continuities with Haywood’s career-long investigation of passion. The volume’s useful Introduction and Appendices, which include excerpts from Haywood’s didactic writings, from the pornographic source Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in Her Smock (1724), and from Nahum Tate’s A Present for the Ladies: Being an Historical Account of Several Illustrious Persons of the Female Sex (1692), make this collection indispensable testimony not only to Haywoodian love’s ‘‘tenthousand nameless Softnesses,’’butalsotothe literary inventions that still compel readers , Haywood states, to ‘‘enjoy them over again in Theory.’’ Ms. Merritt’s Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators most importantly presents a conjunction of texts that reveal the resonance and durability of the thematics of sight across Haywood ’s career. For this reason, Beyond Spectacle marks a milestone in Haywood ’s contemporary critical history—a milestone in the application of feminist methodologies to Haywood’s oeuvre and a milestone in our understanding of the ways in which her multifarious works speak...