The Rash Resolve and Life’s Progress by Eliza Haywood (review)

This first critical edition of two of Haywood’s novellas is part of the Chawton Library Series, from Pickering & Chatto, which makes available rare and out of print women’s writing in English from 1600 to 1830. Readers interested in continuity and development in Haywood’s career will enjoy the juxtaposition of a 1720s with a 1740s novella. The texts also further contribute to conversations about Haywood’s politics; for example, Life’s Progress features a hero who loses his government position because he is perceived as a Jacobite. Ms. Stewart’s introduction contextualizes the politics—both personal and national—that influenced Haywood and gives us a Haywood who plays the political games of Aaron Hill’s coterie and who is “a significant practitioner of the novel as a genre, and a commentator on, and creator of, her times.” Her introduction develops the ways both novellas use the conflict between the legal and religious, public and private, exchange of marriage promises. The Rash Resolve (1723) features the exchange of oaths of commitment and love between Emilius and Emanuella, which are broken during a misunderstanding, but not until after their relationship is consummated and she is pregnant. The hero of Life’s Progress (1748), Natura, engages himself via contract to a woman who is secretly a prostitute and whom his father eventually has to pay off for her to stop considering herself legally his wife. Neither couple gets married formally or publicly; Haywood uses the potential ambiguities of oaths to explore the nature of faithfulness and honesty in romantic relationships.

The Rash Resolve begins in the Spanish West Indies and follows the heroine Emanuella to Spain as she tries to reclaim her fortune from her conniving guardian, Don Pedro. As a woman, her claim is not enough. It is not until Don Pedro’s son falls on his sword and dies as a testament to his father’s guilt, and Don Pedro confesses, that she is believed. The pattern begun here is repeated throughout the novella. Emanuella’s virtue is rarely a match for the machinations of ambitious and unfaithful men and women. Even when Emanuella finds out she is pregnant, she refuses to go to the unfaithful Emilius for help. When he later finds out she has had a son, he assumes it is with another man. Otherwise, she would have come to him for help. She is punished again and again for her attempts at self-reliance.

Haywood also thoughtfully explores the ubiquitous eighteenth-century battle between “interest” and “inclination.” Characters are driven by their passions, which need to be checked by a recommitment to self-protection. Emilius marries someone else, and Haywood movingly portrays Emanuella’s struggles to support herself and her son, Victorinus. Throughout this section, The Rash Resolve focuses on motherhood. Romantic love is no longer the most powerful driving passion. The story ends with Emilius asking for forgiveness and Emanuella dying “of a broken Heart” in poverty. Emilius and his wife—who has demonstrated her virtue by offering to cede Emilius to Emanuella—raise Victorinus.

Life’s Progress, written twenty-five years after The Rash Resolve, is the more complex text, and is often as emotional. Ms. Stewart notes in her introduction that Haywood’s preface is Fieldingesque; its plot “uncannily anticipates [that] of Tom Jones,” which appears six months later. Haywood, according to Ms. Stewart, reflects “on the actions of her characters to a much greater extent than she had done before. Indeed, the moral and intellectual framework is the pretext for the novel.” For Haywood, our passions drive human actions, but because they counteract each other, they check one another. Throughout, Haywood comments on the ways our passions overcome our reason. Natura typifies this conflict. His ambitions for praise often clash with other baser passions. Natura meets a woman at the opera, whose senses are overwhelmed by the music. This woman’s “false step” “was no more on her part than a surprise on...