The Narrator as Invisible Spy: Eliza Haywood, Secret History and the Novel

This essay argues that Haywood used The Invisible Spy (1755) to lay bare narrative devices that she deployed in much of her amatory fiction as well as in her secret histories, and that distinguished secret history from history, the spy from the spectator, and what Haywood called the “novel” from contemporary confessional forms of fictional writing. Haywood was making a polemical statement both about her own career and about the “novel” at the end of her life, at a moment when history and the novel were contending for supremacy on much the same ground. In doing so, Haywood highlights a key but neglected dimension of the history of the novel.