Abstract
This article explores Eliza Haywood’s Cleomelia; Or The Generous Mistress: Being the Secret History of a Lady Lately Arrived from Bengall (1727), an obscure tale preoccupied with the politics of British investment in exotic foreign trade and speculation. Against the Eastern backdrop of Bengali trading posts and the remote Spice Islands, Haywood examines the sanguine Whig attitude to the economic possibilities of foreign trade. Exploiting the associations between female sexuality and speculative investment that had emerged so powerfully after South Sea Bubble incident in 1720, Haywood uses Cleomelia’s many marriages to illuminate an abstract notion of value. Cleomelia enters the contemporary socio-political discourse of credit and speculation with ambivalence; while Haywood appears to criticize the self-interest, exploitation and high level of risk involved in Whig overseas trade policy, she also explores these elements more sympathetically through the heroine’s astute manipulation of the marriage market.
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