The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work (review)

REVIEWS121 fort laborieuse. D'autre part, le point de vue original de A.M. Boilleau est trop souvent noyé sous le volume et la quantité de trop longues références aux textes consacrés—presque exclusivement français—de la critique diderotienne . On aurait aimé plus de détachement et d'indépendance par rapport à cette critique et plus d'ouverture aux voix d'outre atlantique. Peut-être alors aurait-on compris l'allusion gratuite à «une certaine école américaine» placée dans l'introduction de l'ouvrage (p. 13). Il n'en reste pas moins que cette étude minutieuse constitue une tentative louable d'analyse exhaustive et de réhabilitation des Lettres à Sophie Volland. Marie-Hélène Chabut Lehigh University Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio, eds. The Passionate Fictions ofEliza Haywood: Essays on HerLife and Work. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. ix + 367pp. US$32.50. ISBN 0-81312161 -2. The publication of this welcome volume of essays marks a pivotal moment in Haywood scholarship, a moment in which we can discern developing areas of interest, and ascertain which critical methods and strategies are producing worthwhile results and what preoccupations and prejudices have been left behind. Much in the collection will make a decisive contribution to Haywood studies and, crucially, will help direct future analysis. Kirsten Saxton's claim that "the essays speak to Haywood's centrality to eighteenthcentury English literature and explore her texts' engagement with the critical , social, aesthetic, and political discourses of her day" (p. 3) is largely fulfilled; the claim itselfregisters the new direction in Haywood scholarship that has been underway in recent years. The necessity for reassessments of Haywood's career underlies Paula Backscheider's opening essay, "The Story of Eliza Haywood's Novels: Caveats and Questions." Backscheider sets out, first of all, to upset the "Story" ofHaywood's career with which all Haywood scholars are well acquainted. The change in Haywood's literary practices, her shift from racy to respectable, was originally considered the result of a personal reformation; now, however, most critics attribute it to her canny assessment of a changing literary marketplace. Neither the plot nor the explanations can be confirmed, and, as Backscheider points out, perhaps it is time to rethink the "Story" itself: "How do we connect her texts, including those from the 1720s and from the 1750s, to each other in meaningful ways?" (p. 20). We can begin to take the long view of her career, recognizing that she sustained a set of preoccupations and strategies over the 122EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION14:1 course of nearly forty years as a professional writer. Haywood was an innovative and profoundly ambiguous writer, one whose ideological and political commitments may be ultimately impossible to ascertain precisely. Many of the contributors to Passionate Fictions clearly concur with Backscheider 's sense of Haywood's complexity, her "ironic self-consciousness about narrative voice that admits near-parody, metacommentary, deconstruction , and ironic double commentary into her texts" (p. 28), but two, in particular, stand out. Both write on The History ofBetsy Thoughtless: David Oakleaf's essay, "'Shady bowers! And Purling Streams!—Heavens, How Insipid ': Eliza Haywood's Artful Pastoral," argues that Haywood's techniques with voice (parody and mimicry), her heteroglossic playfulness and deft parody (including self-parody), are no happy accident but the result of craft. Andrea Austin sees in Betsy Thoughtless the opportunity to theorize a specifically woman's form of parody. In "Shooting Blanks: Potency, Parody , and Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless," she argues that "metaphors of aggression, sexual potency and ... the parodist's oedipal struggle to mark distance from the parodied text" (p. 259) have traditionally marked parody as a masculine form; this has meant that the parodie strategies of women writers have not been registered in the critical literature . Haywood's parody blends pastiche and parody, allowing her to incorporate "a more flexible use of intertextuality that does not necessarily involve an attack on the borrowed form, but may certainly involve multiple, even contradictory stances" (p. 264). Oakleaf's and Austin's recognition of Haywood's sophisticated use of metacritical devices helps to shift the critical ground: the perception of Haywood's...