Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Work of Eliza Haywood ed. by Tiffany Potter Manushag N. Powell Tiffany Potter, ed., Approaches to Teaching the Work of Eliza Haywood ( New York: Modern Language Association, 2020). Pp. 238. $29.00 paper. Tiffany Potter's edited volume on teaching the work of Eliza Haywood is an ambitious collection with scholarly as well as pedagogical significance, well worth reading in its entirety. Potter joins the ranks of Haywood thinkers such as Kathryn King, Catherine Ingrassia, Ros Ballaster, Toni Bowers, Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Paula Backscheider, and others in challenging the still-lingering tendency to oversimplify Haywood into a women's novelist—one who made her name by writing racy sex stories and spent her youth transgressing, and then later reformed into a middle-aged middling-class moralizer. None of these claims is accurate, but they are ubiquitous, appearing in such unhelpful places as the Norton Anthology's headnote, as Catherine Ingrassia points out (104). Yet inevitably, students come across these myths, and, per Aleksondra Hultquist, their "tidiness makes them tempting" (141). But the untidy Haywood defies categories and simple narratives, and Potter's volume is framed around the power of Haywood's complexity. "Effective teaching of Haywood's works requires thinking that breaks free from such imposed narratives," declares Potter (21). Hear, hear. Haywood's body of work is vast, varied, and often experimental, and a concise volume that sets out to deal with how to teach her in the modern classroom faces a daunting challenge. There is so very much Haywood, and no very clear agreement on how to talk about her. This is also the glory of Haywood studies, and why it has become one of the most vital areas in eighteenth-century literary work today. Potter, an accomplished editor of Haywood, knows what she is about; the authors she has gathered represent a kind of "who's who" in forward-looking Haywood scholarship. Better yet, the contributors have clearly been able to see and respond to each other's work during composition; as a result, the collection is a more cohesive and enjoyable read than the average teaching anthology. At more than two dozen essays, the Haywood volume itself fittingly defies easy summation; I regret that space does not allow me to treat each contribution here. (And speaking of value, an index and margins wide enough to annotate would be welcome additions to the material text.) Potter reports the keen interest in Haywood studies that preceded the anthology and the need for class-room friendly editions of Haywood's works that this interest implies; a survey of instructors showed [End Page 726] "a widely expressed interest in expanding [the Haywood] canon, especially into Haywood's periodical and dramatic works and shorter narrative pieces" (13). The very useful section "Texts for Teaching" underscores the difficulty of accessing much of Haywood's immense oeuvre, even as it highlights the many Haywood editions that are now available, in large part thanks to Broadview Press's increasingly central role in enlarging what's become possible in the eighteenth-century classroom. "Texts for Teaching" also offers a helpful, thorough, and highly accessible digest of trends in Haywood criticism and scholarship which is will be valuable to teachers, scholars, and inquisitive students alike. Likewise useful is the admirable job that the essays gathered here do of resisting the facile assumptions that Haywood is interesting only as a woman novelist and that the realist novel form should be the one most studied among women authors. Instead, contributors embrace Haywood as a complex, multigeneric, and sometimes strikingly modern writer. For example, Stephen Ahern employs affect theory when he admires rather than denigrates Haywood for depicting "bodies in the grip of intensities that run through them but are not their own" (97). Key to the volume's appeal to me is its laudable if imperfect attempt to journey beyond Fantomina (as well as, perhaps, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless and Love in Excess). The collection's preface notes both the "sudden critical prominence" of Haywood, which has grown alongside the proliferation of cheap, teachable versions of the role-playing puzzler Fantomina. Indeed, as Patrick Spedding's contribution makes clear, there...

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