(Re)framing Eliza Haywood: Portraiture, Printer’s Ornaments, and the Fashioning of Female Authorship

An examination of visual representations of Eliza Haywood in the form of portraits, printer’s ornaments, and frontispieces not only reveals new potential images of Haywood as an author, but also provides history and context for her life and work. As there are a number of other images of Haywood beyond the iconic portrait engraved by George Vertue, considering these images in relation to one another allows us to see multiple, historically contextualized facets of Haywood’s life and work. This contextualization begins to put into practice what Kathryn King has called for in A Political Biography: more studies that take what Juliette Merrit has called the “long view” of Haywood studies. This long view incorporates the almost forty years of Haywood’s career—including her writing preoccupations and strategies as an author—instead of focusing on decontextualized or reductive readings of her texts. This essay explores visual representations of Haywood throughout her career in order to offer a long view of the ways in which ways these representations helped build a carefully constructed persona of the author herself.