Selected Works of Eliza Haywood I: Vol. 1: Miscellaneous Writings, 1725–43, ed. by Alexander Pettit, and: Selected Works of Eliza Haywood II: Vol. 1: The Historiographer (A Companion to the Theatre, Volume 1) and The Parrot ed. by Christine Blouch, Alexander Pettit, and Rebecca Sayers Hanson (review)

115 text’s excluded mother figures.’’ Sophia, in other words, may be a wise date, but she is also ‘‘an object of incestuous desire.’’ Far from feeling self-contradictory, these moments confirm what Ms. Pollak wants to tell us about incest being more a discursive event than a stable or reified plot point. Chapter Six includes a brief discussion of Tristram Shandy, David Simple and Evelina , as well as commentary on a 1751 pamphlet that rewrites one of Marguerite de Navarre’s sixteenth-century Heptameron tales. In this story a young man inadvertently sleeps first with his mother, then later with the daughter who is the product of their union. When he eventually learns the story from a letter left him by his deceasedmother he swallows the letter and kills himself. Ms. Pollak suggests that this ‘‘cannibalization’’ of the mother (the letter’s ‘‘incorporation into the order of cultural intelligibility’’) will nonetheless not succeed in silencing her, since we are what we eat. Or to put it another way (the author quotes Kaja Silverman quoting Lacan discussing Heidegger): eating ‘‘the book’’ means the ‘‘ecstatic rediscovery, at the site of the other, of one’s utmost ‘ownness.’’’ The book’s final and eminently digestible chapter is devoted to a tasty reading of Mansfield Park. Included are a Bibliography and a full Index. William Donaghue Emerson College Selected Works of Eliza Haywood I: Vol. 1: Miscellaneous Writings, 1725–43, ed. AlexanderPettit.BiographicalIntro.byChristineBlouch.Vol.2:EpistlesfortheLadies, ed. Alexander Pettit and Christine Blouch, introd. and annotated by Christine Blouch. Vol 3: The Wife, The Husband, and The Young Lady, ed. Alexander Pettit and Margo Collins. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000. Pp. lxxxii ⫹ 288, xi ⫹ 480, xi ⫹ 339. $395. Selected Works of Eliza Haywood II: Vol. 1: The Historiographer (A Companion to the Theatre, Volume 1) and The Parrot, ed. Christine Blouch, Alexander Pettit, and Rebecca Sayers Hanson. Vols. 2 and 3: The Female Spectator, Volumes 1 and 2 and The Female Spectator, Volumes 3 and 4, ed. Kathryn R. King and Alexander Pettit. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001. Pp. xviii ⫹ 366, xiv ⫹ 471, vi ⫹ 489. $395. This splendid edition is cause for celebration. To thehandfulof editedtexts(primarily fiction) now available, Pickering and Chatto have added ‘‘the first multi-volume edition ’’of Haywood’s works to appear in print since 1742; that is, the first since the fourvolume Secret Histories, Novels and Poems last appeared. The textual editor, Mr. Pettit, argues that editors have ‘‘[i]nadvertently . . . visited upon Haywood the fate that still distorts perceptions of her contemporaries, Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding: she has become a novelist rather than a writer.’’ This edition consequently avoids its predecessor ’s secret histories, novels, and poems for a judicious sampling that ‘‘attempts to restore something of the shape’’ of her career. Two miscellaneous collections, the two parts of The Tea-Table (1725) and Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), date from Haywood’s prolific first decade as an amatory novelist. For good measure, 116 the Tea-Table volume also includes Love-Letters on All Occasions (1730) and A Present for a Servant-Maid (1743), Haywood’s enormously popular manualofdomesticadvice. The Dramatic Historiographer (1735, later the first volume of A Companion to the Theatre), which discusses forty-five plays, most of them acted recently, dates from the period of Haywood’s most intense involvement in the theater; the editors also include the author’s Preface to the 1747 two-volume collection and The Parrot (1746), Haywood ’s most topical and overtly political periodical. A matched pair of conduct manuals , The Wife (‘‘By Mira, One of the Authors of the Female Spectator, and Epistles for [the] Ladies,’’ 1755 but dated 1756) and The Husband (‘‘In Answer to The Wife,’’ 1756), come from the very end of her career; the editors combine them in a volume with The Young Lady (1756), the weekly that Haywood abandoned because of illness shortly before she died. The three longest volumes contain the substantial and (judging from later editions and translations) highly successful works with which Mira, and hence Haywood, identifies herself: Epistles for the Ladies (1749–1750) and, long the greatest need in Haywood studies, the Female Spectator (1744–1746...