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61 PATRICK SPEDDING. A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004. Pp. 848. $195. This book does far more than displace George Frisbie Whicher’s 1915 study, The Life and Romances of Eliza Haywood. In a sustained effort of painstaking scholarship, Mr. Spedding pieces together the shape of Haywood’s writing life from published texts, advertisements, surviving records of copyright sales, and the like. Following P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens’s cautious principles of attribution, he expands the Haywood canon. For four actual or putative collections and seventy-two individual titles before 1850, he supplies a number; a headnote, sometimes extensive, that discusses publication, reception, and pertinent biographical information; and a detailed table for each issue and edition, including translations (our knowledge of which he greatly expands). Each item begins with an edition statement and, where that differs from the title page, a descriptive tag. The publication history of Love in Excess (1719–1720), for example, is now clear. Ab1.1a and Ab1.1b in the numbering system distinguish two issues of the first edition of Part one, the latter calling itself the ‘‘Third Edition, Corrected ’’; Ab1.4a and Ab1.4b identify two issues of the complete novel’s ‘‘Fourth Edition , Corrected,’’ actually its second edition. For each edition of each work, there follows a quasi-facsimile transcription of the title page (with a few sensible modifications of familiar conventions); other titles; a thorough collation; the contents; running titles; errors in catchwords; plates; ornaments; press figures; advertisements; mottoes (identified wherever possible and translated when not English); variants; date of publication or record of advertisements; price; reviews (which Mr. Spedding also quotes extensively ); references to bibliographical works, especially the ESTC; lists of copies seen, copies examined by proxy or through reproduction, and other known copies; and reproductions . He also records pre-1850 reprints in monographs and periodicals, and post-1850 reprints and editions, including microform, CD-ROM, and electronic texts. Appendices describe rejected attributions and ghosts; works published by Haywood, sold by her at the Sign of Fame, and written by or attributed to her long-time collaborator , William Hatchett. Other Appendices trace the course of works with complex publication histories, such as The Opera of Operas; copyrights; adaptations; evidence for attributions to Haywood; measures of Haywood’s output, income, and popularity; evidence for her arrest; portraits of Haywood; and Hatchett’s relationship with Bryan Dawson, who sued him to recover a debt. In addition to a general Index and Bibliography , there are indexes of first editions and of Haywood’s printers and publishers. Mr. Spedding has produced an indispensable resource for students not just of Haywood , but of the era’s print culture. To nonbibliographers, this description might suggest dull utility. But were it not so heavy, this dense, technical book would be hard to put down. Citing Frederick Pottle, Mr. Spedding treats bibliography as a step toward biography. It is exciting to watch his detective work as he finds and arranges small clues. Those of us who accepted or exaggerated William H. McBurney’s claims for the phenomenal success of Love in 62 Excess now stand corrected: its six editions and (likely) six thousand copies represent genuine but more modest success. Still, although pregnancy and the theater delayed and then prevented its publication, her booksellers promptly advertised a collection, The Danger of Giving Way to Passion in Five Exemplary Novels, for which she wrote The British Recluse, The Injur’d Husband, Idalia, Lasselia, and The Rash Resolve. When Haywood and Hatchett translated Crébillon’s popular The Sopha (1742), she was paid a guinea a sheet, twice her collaborator’s rate. Such were the modest rewards of success. Mr. Spedding’s biographical interests justify including Haywood’s publishing ventures and information about Hatchett, with whom it is now clear that Haywood did share her carefully guarded private life (including vacations) as well as her writing life. She likely suffered serious illness in 1737–1740. In 1752, she moved to 2 Cowley Street, where descendants lived until 1788: disruptions in the household likely explain the revision of Cleomelia in 1741 and its appearance in 1788 as The History of Leonora Meadowson. Since much of this remains...

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