A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood
Kathryn King
Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies
978 1 85196 917 3: 216x138mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 688 2
While under arrest in 1750 on suspicion of producing a seditious pamphlet Eliza Haywood insisted she ‘never wrote any thing in a political way’. This study of the life and works, the first full-length biography of Haywood in nearly a century, takes the measure of her duplicity.
Known today for her novels of sexual passion, Haywood wrote much in the ‘political way’. She exposed ongoing financial corruptions in her early scandal chronicles. By the mid-thirties she had joined the campaign to topple Walpole, attacking him in the blistering Oriental satire Eovaai (1736) and performing on stage in Fielding’s final plays at the Haymarket. In the forties and fifties she produced political journalism for various factions in the Opposition. She sold anti-ministerial propaganda at her own pamphlet-shop at the Sign of Fame in Covent Garden, wrote a Jacobite weekly paper attacking the Duke of Cumberland, and promoted the mid-century cult of the Patriot Prince in the deceptively entitled Epistles to the Ladies (1749-50).
This political biography views Haywood’s life through the prism of her shifting political allegiances. It reads a sizeable selection of her vast output – scandal chronicles, satires, political journalism, and politically inflected prose fictions – alongside debates in the press and traces for the first time her associations with a number of contemporaries, among them Richard Savage, Aaron Hill, Henry Fielding, James Ralph, Richard Glover, and William Hatchett. Haywood moved easily through a man’s world of political journalism but produced texts compelling today for their wily feminism. Her works offer a distinctively female perspective on public and private life, forge links between party-political networks and the worlds of the drawing room, tea table, and conversational circle, and expose the misogyny of much political thought even as they craft new identities for women in the political nation.
Readership
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Women's Studies