A Special Issue on New Approaches to Eliza Haywood: The Political Biography and Beyond

The scholarly and critical treatment of Eliza Haywood’s work ranges from tidy nineteenth-century accounts of her reformation from a writer of scandalous amatory fiction to a writer of demure domestic fiction; to mid-twentieth-century relegations of her work to a subcategory of inferior, feminine, amatory fiction; to late-twentieth century reclamations of Haywood as a prolific, professional writer of diverse literary genres; to more recent, expansive interpretations of her as a “slippery, fluid, multifarious, strategic, opportunistic, chameleon-like, and performance-driven writer keenly attuned to the evolving circumstances of literary commerce” (King, Political Biography 195). Yet throughout these varied treatments, Haywood has remained what Kathryn R. King calls an “uncooperative biographical subject” (Political Biography 1) who, as David Erskine Baker famously reports in his 1764 The Companion to the Play-House, instructed her companions to keep any biographical details of her life out of the public sphere (Baker 321). These companions, as it turns out, were both very loyal and very successful. In fact, it is likely that this dearth of biographical information tempted early Haywood scholars toward apocryphal speculation and indeed, helped to create an enduring myth surrounding Haywood’s life.

In part as an effort to correct biographical and interpretive errors in Haywood scholarship and in part as an effort to recast Eliza Haywood as a complex, market-savvy, and prolific author of wide-ranging literary genres, King recently produced a thematically-focused, comprehensive political biography of Haywood titled A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood.¹ This deliberate decision to analyze Haywood’s literary oeuvre strictly through the lens of political, historical, and cultural criticism effectively ended Haywood’s designation as a mere amatory novelist and modeled a potently effective method for the critical exploration of eighteenth-century literary texts. Even as it acknowledges the monumental contributions of previous Haywood scholars such as Patrick Spedding and Christine Blouch, King’s biography succinctly and effectively rejects many of the speculative claims about Haywood in order to demythologize the more scandalous narrative and recast it as a “compelling story… of a young woman’s journey towards literary professionalism and ultimately oppositional political engagement” (Political Biography 17).

Over the past several decades, feminist scholars have successfully reclaimed Haywood as a legitimate literary subject, and many have focused their attention on her amatory novels in their examinations of female subjectivity and agency and of cultural constructions of sensibility, gender, and domesticity; Haywood’s work undoubtedly has been fruitful ground for this important critical work. Although fewer in number, others have carefully examined Haywood’s plays, periodicals, and overtly political writings, emphasizing her role as what Patsy Fowler has called elsewhere a “legitimate player within the literary marketplace” (179) and envisioning her as an intelligent and calculating participant in the public sphere who strove to secure patrons, dismantle her critics, and control her own image (her personal “brand,” we would say now). King’s comprehensive, detailed, and nuanced treatment of Haywood’s public life and political writings considerably advances this critical exercise, providing readers with the first full-length biography of Haywood in almost a century and offering readers a serious and attentive examination of Haywood’s fearless political engagement in the public sphere. King develops in her monograph a “long view” of Haywood, examining her writings over the course of forty years, and contending that, though Haywood “engaged energetically and at times vehemently in anti-ministerial satire and journalism,” her “political positions were complex and shifting, [and] to some degree situational” (Political Biography 7), especially during the early years of her literary career. In adopting such a nuanced view, King persuasively argues against the rather simplistic perception of Haywood as a Tory propagandist doggedly forwarding a party line. King’s meticulous examination of both Haywood’s literary and personal associations and patrons and her rhetorical allusions and references reveals that Haywood was astute, calculating, and fluid in her political associations. When studied attentively, Haywood’s political writings reveal a public participant who fearlessly satirized and criticized both ministerial and Tory factions...