Eliza Haywood and the Narratological Tropes of Secret History

Abstract

1785 Clara Reeve divided Eliza Haywood's oeuvre into three parts: the amorous written youth ; the books of the same kind as Mrs. Manley's capital work, all of which I hope forgotten; and finally, latter works, none of which are destitute of merit (120-21). Although she inaugurated the now familiar binary distinction between and late Haywood, Reeve nevertheless praised Haywood, three decades after death, for skills as a writer across various genres: the novelist of Betsy Thoughtless (1751), the periodical writer of The Female Spectator (1744-45), and the miscellaneous writer of The Invisible Spy (1754). 1810, in On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing, Anna Barbauld narrowed the lens through which subsequent generations would understand Haywood 's by empha- sizing the distinction between earlier novels . . . in the style of Mrs. Behn's (i.e. licentious) and her later works which Barbauld judges by no means void of merit (400-01). Haywood had thus become by the early nineteenth century a marginalized novelist whose novels were valued in inverse proportion to their level of licentiousness.By the time Ian Watt wrote his Rise of the Novel in 1957, Haywood would be lumped together with Behn and Manley as a writer of inferior novels, those exhibiting the tropes of romance rather than the Whig realism he located in what for him was the central thread of the realist novel 's rise (18-19). sub- sequent decades, many of us worked to reposition Haywood 's within the of the novel, thus continuing a tendency to view primarily as a novelist.1 insightful new Political Biography of Eliza Haywood, Kathryn King shifts the critical conversation away from Haywood the novelist to Hay- wood the writer of political histories, plays, periodicals, and pamphlets. King teases out Haywood 's shifting partisan alliances across career, cor- recting the longstanding critical assumption that Haywood was a lifelong Tory. King also urges us to move beyond another critical truism: that of the binary opposition between and late Haywood. King believes that will not be enough to construct new linear narratives of Haywood 's work; it be necessary to do away with linearity altogether (195).Although I agree with King's caution against seeking a single linear narra- tive to describe Haywood 's work, I nevertheless propose that we may identify a consistent thread across Haywood 's career, one that is noticeable in less obviously political novels as well as in more overtly political pamphlets and periodicals: narratological engagement with the genre of history. analysis of Haywood 's adroitness at political parody, Earla Wilputte cau- tions: In our efforts to revise Haywood 's role as a novelist, we must be careful not to neglect other where she also uses novelistic techniques and discourse (Parody 230). We must likewise, I argue, consider the techniques of in both obviously political and novels.Scholars have recognized Delarivier Manley's style of in Haywood's two keyed histories from the 1720s and in Adventures of Eovaai (1736), but they have tended to overlook the traces of in that often appear to modern readers as apolitical of fiction.2 Nev- ertheless, Haywood 's engagement with is evident both in with secret history or secret memoirs on the title page, as well as in those marketed as pamphlets or novels. Across career, Haywood deployed two important narratological tropes of the historian: the tendency to reveal the secrets of public figures while concealing the author's own political position and the tendency to muse self-reflectively about the author's own role as a writer of in relationship to other writers of history. Moreover, Hay- wood 's facility in deploying these dual narratological devices of concealment and confession helps explain our difficulty in pinning down either intrinsic political sympathies or shifting partisan allegiances. …