Eliza Haywood was one of the first novelists
in the English language, but she needed rescuing
from obscurity and disrepute

By Linda Robinson Walker

Women's views of love make the publishing world go round. It all began 270 years ago with Eliza Haywood, whose best-selling novels captivated readers with prose like this:

"Fly this barbarous Place, O thou once most charming of thy Sex, and still valued, though an Eunuch."

"That passage from Philidore and Placentia, a novel of 1727, gives you an idea of Eliza Haywood's plots–not exactly classics, but fun," says Christine Blouch, assistant professor of English at Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois. Blouch received her PhD from Michigan in 1991, and won the English department's Thorpe Award for the outstanding dissertation. Blouch established that Haywood may have as much right to be called the first English novelist as Daniel Defoe.

Eliza Haywood, 1693?-1756, wrote Love in Excess in 1719, the year of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Haywood's romance novel went in to seven printings over 10 years and was second only to Defoe's book in popularity

"It's hard to find a parallel in our time for a career like Haywood's," Blouch says. Haywood's career spanned almost 40 years. She wrote more than 50 novels, had four plays performed, published six periodicals, made numerous translations from the French and also wrote poetry, political satire and a popular conduct manual for female servants. Rounding out her versatility was a 1735 chronicle of British theater, A Companion to the Theater, which was in print for 20 years.

"The early 18th century was marked by increasing literacy among everyone, but especially women who created a new audience for literature," Blouch notes. "Women had always published private collections of verse, circulating poems to friends, but had not been successful in the literary marketplace. That began to change in the previous generation when Aphra Behn (1640-89) was able to support herself with her writing. Behn paved the way for authors like Delariviere Manley, Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, and Haywood.

"When Haywood began writing there was precedent and an audience," Blouch says. "What she offered were lively, erotic books that became hugely successful." In a typical Haywood novel a beautiful heroine with a foreign name ("Haywood's characters are really English, but she puts them in remote countries so they can do things that would take explaining in England," Blouch says) succumbs to the wooing of a man.