Published together for the first time, Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela and Henry Fielding’s An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews are the two most important responses to Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela. Anti-Pamela comments on Richardson’s representations of work, virtue, and gender, while also questioning the generic expectations of the novel that Pamela establishes, and it provides a vivid portrayal of the material realities of life for a woman in eighteenth-century London. Fielding’s Shamela punctures both the figure Richardson established for himself as an author and Pamela’s preoccupation with virtue. This Broadview edition also includes a rich selection of historical materials, including writings from the period on sexuality, women’s work, Pamela and the print trade, and education and conduct.

Haywood's novel is the story of the beautiful Princess Eovaai. Groomed for the throne by her father, who teaches her Lockean notions of liberty, she is overthrown, enmeshed in civil war, and then magically transported to a foreign land by an evil man. Part magician, part politician, he plots to marry her for political reasons. The fascinating reflexive structure of The Adventures of Eovaai incorporates argumentative intrusions (by the Translator, an Historian, etc.), interweaves political and amatory storylines, and blends a wild mix of genres.

This book explores the ways in which three women novelists of the late-17th and early-18th centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention.

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the 'woman writer' emerged as a category of authorship in England. Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670-1750 seeks to uncover how exactly this happened and the ways publishers tried to market a new kind of author to the public. Based on a survey of nearly seven hundred works with female authors from this period, this book contends that authorship was constructed, not always by the author, for market appeal, that biography often supported an authorial persona rooted in the genre of the work, and that authorship was a role rather than an identity. Through an emphasis on paratexts, including prefaces, title pages, portraits, and biographical notes, Leah Orr analyses the representation of women writers in this period of intense change to make two related arguments. First, women writers were represented in a variety of ways as publishers sought successful models for a new kind of writer in print. Second, a new approach is needed for studying early women writers and others who occupy gaps in the historical record. This book shows that a study of the material contexts of printed books is one way to work with the evidence that survives. It therefore begins with a very familiar kind of author-centric literary history and deconstructs it to conclude with a reception-centered history that takes a more encompassing view of authorship. In addition to analysis of many little-known and anonymous authors, case studies include Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter/Cockburn, Laetitia Pilkington, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, and Anne Dacier.

The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, originally published as three volumes in 1753, is the last work by the prolific English novelist Eliza Haywood. Out of print since the early nineteenth century and never available in an edited and fully-annotated modern edition such as this, Haywood’s novel is an important early example of the sentimental novel of domestic manners. In its depiction of marriage and courtship among the leisure class of the mid-eighteenth century, Haywood’s novel is remarkable for its unsentimental realism.

Theories of sight and spectatorship captivated many writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century and, in turn, helped to define both sexual politics and gender identity. Eliza Haywood was thoroughly engaged in the social, philosophical, and political issues of her time, and she wrote prolifically about them, producing over seventy-five works of literature - plays, novels, and pamphlets - during her lifetime. Examining a number of works from this prodigious canon, Juliette Merritt focuses on Haywood's consideration of the myriad issues surrounding sight and seeing and argues that Haywood explored strategies to undermine the conventional male spectator/female spectacle structure of looking. Combining close readings of Haywood's work with twentieth-century debates among feminist and psychoanalytic theorists concerning the visual dynamics of identity and gender formation, Merritt explores insights into how the gaze operates socially, epistemologically, and ontologically in Haywood's writing, ultimately concluding that Haywood's own strategy as an author involved appropriating the spectator position as a means of exercising female power. Beyond Spectacle will cement Haywood's deservedly prominent place in the canon of eighteenth-century fiction and position her as a writer whose work speaks not only to female agency, but to eighteenth-century writers, gender relations, and power politics as well.

Although Mrs. Haywood was evidently not responsible for the inclusion of her tale in "The Female Dunciad," and although the piece itself was entirely innocuous, her daring to raise her head even by accident brought down upon her another scurrilous rebuke, not this time from the poet himself, but from her former admirer, Richard Savage.

Written by a combination of established scholars and new critics in the field, the essays collected in Circuit of Apollo attest to the vital practice of commemorating women’s artistic and personal relationships. In doing so, they illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honor as well as the robust creativity and intellectual work contributed by women to culture in the long eighteenth century. Women’s tributes to each other sometimes took the form of critical engagement or competition, but they always exposed the feminocentric networks of artistic, social, and material exchange women created and maintained both in and outside of London. This volume advocates for a new perspective for researching and teaching early modern women that is grounded in admiration. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press