Eliza Haywood, Periodicalist(?)

Few scholars would now dispute the importance of Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator, which was widely read across second half of the eighteenth century and quickly became one of its author’s most enduring and emblematic texts. While many modern readers think of Haywood most immediately as a novelist (and usually a scandalous one at that), the Female Spectator was not Haywood’s only periodical; indeed, her engagement with periodical writing, initiated by the success of the Female Spectator, persisted throughout her final decade of life and literary production. Across this crucial period Haywood penned numerous periodical-inflected texts, including the highly popular Invisible Spy and the Epistles for the Ladies, the latter of whose importance we have only recently begun to realize. In evaluating the periodical “flavor” of the years in which Haywood was actively defining her literary legacy, this essay hopes to offer evidence of the remarkable extent of Haywood’s virtuoso flexibility with respect to the conventions of the literary marketplace, as well as to question seriously what it means to write or claim to write an eighteenth-century periodical in the first place.