scholarly journals Eliza Haywood and the Languages of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

XVII-XVIII ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Orla Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eliza Haywood

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

The Stage Career of Eliza Haywood

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Elwood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Way

Female playwrights of varying degrees of quality were reasonably plentiful in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England; but, except for Eliza Haywood, few of these playwrights doubled as actresses, at least with sufficient success for us to be aware of their talents. Even the stage career of Mrs. Haywood, one extending at least from 1715 to 1737, has not been documented in its entirety before now. It deserves attention because it adds some details to the scanty biography of this woman who is best known as a novelist, a novelist who turned out scandal chronicles long before Richardson made the novel morally acceptable, and who in 1751 produced what may be the first domestic novel in English,The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Along the way she had some success as a publisher, as the first woman writer of a periodical for women, as a poet, and as a playwright and actress. It was her efforts in the theater that drew the attention of such men as Jonathan Swift and Richard Savage and brought her into a rather lengthy association with Henry Fielding. And it was her theatrical experience that contributed much to her eventual skill as a novelist. She liked the stage, and much of what we like in her later work she owed to the stage.

‘Labours of the Press’

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Sabor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
John Cleland ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Prime Target

The impact of Samuel Richardson’s best-seller, Pamela (1740), on eighteenth-century novel-writing cannot be exaggerated. It was a prime target for pirated editions, some of which included unauthorized additional material and illustrations, and for spurious continuations. Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, and John Cleland were among the many contemporary authors who wrote novels responding to Pamela: Shamela (1741), Anti-Pamela (1741), and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–9). The controversy over its merits which raged in the early 1740s was still alive in the early 1800s. Richardson’s attempts to manage the controversy through repeated textual revisions were ultimately futile: the text read by many nineteenth-century and twentieth-century readers was one not prepared by Richardson but an abridgement, first published by the entrepreneurial bookseller Charles Cooke.

Haywood: Shaping a Fictional Language of Embodiment

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-68
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Joint Attention ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Emotional Involvement ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Embodied Writing ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Bodily States ◽  
The Way

This chapter traces how the eighteenth-century novel develops a language of emotional involvement and embodied intensity through the works of Eliza Haywood. It discusses Haywood’s early works in amatory fiction, her later reflections on the mid-century novel, and her translations from the French. Haywood’s works are related to the integration of letters in novel writing and to the context of the theatre, as this chapter works towards an account of embodied style that is embedded in contemporary media ecologies. In more general terms, models of embodiment in fiction are specified through the way in which these media differences give rise to stances in embodied writing and modulations of joint attention between readers and narrators that make the literary language of embodiment go beyond the mere simulation of bodily states.

Unfelt

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Dynamics

This book offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects, including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, the book explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period's understanding of sensibility. Each of the four sections of the book—on philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economy—charts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, the book's exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the period's writing and thought. Drawing inspiration from contemporary affect theory, the book charts how feeling and unfeeling flow and feed back into each other, identifying emotional dynamics at their most elusive and powerful: the potential, the incipient, the emergent, and the virtual.

Mrs. Mary Davys: Forerunner of Fielding

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 348-355
Author(s):  
William H. McBurney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Similar Role ◽  
Free School ◽  
Boarding House ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Davys

After the scores of “secret histories,” “authentick memoirs,” and “true relations” written by Mrs. Eliza Haywood and other female novelists of the 1720's, the four volumes of fiction by Mrs. Mary Davys produce much the same “cheerful, sunshiny, breezy” effect that Coleridge attributed to Fielding's work, in contrast to “the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson.” The double comparison is more than subjectively valid, for Mrs. Davys stands in much the same relation to Fielding's ebullient masculine genius that Mrs. Haywood's distressed damsels do to Richardson's heroines—both as a forerunner and as an influence upon the early eighteenth-century reading public.Many of the qualities which distinguish Mrs. Davys from her contemporaries may be explained by her background and by the circumstances under which her works were written and published. She was born in Dublin in 1674 and married the Reverend Peter Davys, a friend of Jonathan Swift and headmaster of the free school attached to St. Patrick's. Swift considered the marriage an indiscretion on the headmaster's part but, indiscreet or not, it was apparently a happy one until Davys'early death in 1698. Soon after this, his young widow “went for mere want to England.” She appeared briefly in London in 1700 and then settled in York where she lived for the next fifteen years. Little is known of her during this period. Swift's correspondence and his Journal to Stella indicate that she occasionally visited London, that she tried by various ruses to maintain contact with him from York, and that he grudgingly sent her several sums of money before his return to Ireland in 1714. Such irregular charity could hardly have been sufficient for the most frugal existence, and from pictures of life in a York boarding house and the recurrent character of a settled but good-natured female companion in her plays and novels, one may conjecture that Mrs. Davys enacted a similar role in private life.

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