Eliza Haywood: Gender, Authority and the Print Market

Eliza Haywood published her first novel, 'Love in Excess,' in 1719, the same year that Daniel Defoe published 'Robinson Crusoe.' Like her better-known male counterpart, Haywood was a prolific writer, active in many genres, both under her own name and anonymously. She wrote novels and novellas, plays and farces, conduct books and periodicals, satires and fairy tales; she also translated texts from French and invented new and hybrid genres. In her writing practice, she spanned the fictional and the factual, the masculine and the feminine (and points in between), following the fluctuations of the eighteenth-century market for print with ease, grace, and commercial acumen.

During this seminar, we will read a selection Haywood's texts, as we explore her playful attitude to genre, gender and various forms of authority. As well as reading them closely, we will also be looking at Haywood's texts from a book-historical perspective, as we look at her interactions with the print-market, and at the layout and typography of original eighteenth-century editions of her work.