Trading Sex for Secrets in Haywood’s Love in Excess
Scott Black, Villanova University
Volume 15, no. 2, January 2003
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
This article addresses the ways in which recent historians of the novel have construed Eliza Haywood and her first work, Love in Excess (1719). It responds to Paula Backscheider’s remark, “Suddenly Haywood is everywhere. Yet the study of her individual works is proceeding much too slowly … Less generalized comment on Haywood and closer study of her texts is needed.” I will look closely at a particular moment in her first novel, a moment unexplained by the current critical paradigms applied to Haywood, and thus one that offers us a chance to be surprised by her. In turning from readings organized by sociological effects to those organized by narrative effects, we can begin to recognize a Haywood who was not only a woman writer but also a woman writer, one who grappled not only with questions of identity but also with issues of form, and who belongs in our histories of the novel because her texts are self-conscious explorations of narrative.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Eliza Haywood” include:
Discours libertin et argument national dans le triptyque (Haywood, Crébillon-fils et Kimber) des heureux orphelins
by BEATRIJS VANACKER (24.4, Summer 2012)
Having Text: Desire and Language in Haywood’s Love in Excess and The Distressed Orphan
by SHARON HARROW (ECF 22.2, Winter 2010)
Utopian Voyeurism: Androgyny and the Language of the Eyes in Haywood’s Love in Excess
by ELIZABETH GARGANO (ECF 21.4, Summer 2009)
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