Haywood's Old-Age Rewritings of Love in Excess

Abstract

Haywood's Old-Age Rewritings of Love in Excess Kathryn R. King My subject is Haywood's old-age revisions of Love in Excess (1719). Haywood's debut novel needs no introduction: Love in Excess is indispensable, a must-read for everything from the history of women's storytelling to the study of rape culture across the centuries. But old age? Haywood? This conjoining of terms is a provocation, of course, meant to raise questions about why literary history has shown itself little disposed to grant Hay-wood an old age. When she died in February 1756, she was sixty-three or thereabouts and could rightfully be ranked "among the Number of the Aged," to adopt the language of one of her epistolists.1 Old age in the eighteenth century was thought to begin somewhere between fifty and sixty, earlier if menopause is used to mark the transition, and a woman sadly in want of a husband could expect to attain the title of old maid earlier still. But scholars generally agree to accept sixty as "a particularly strong and common marker for entry into old age."2 In the terms of her culture, then, Haywood wrote into her old age—not that you would know it from the usual accounts of her life and work, which seem fixated upon the youthful Haywood of Love in Excess and other tales of adolescent passion. This youthful bias has impaired our ability to recognize the mature creativity of the work she produced in roughly the final decade of her life: Female Spectator (1744–46), Epistles for the Ladies (1748–50), History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessemy (1753), The Invisible Spy (1755), to name some of the best known. Old age, ripened maturity, a seasoned sensibility: phrases such as these sound odd uttered in the vicinity of the name of Haywood, and that oddness speaks to a failure to imagine the end of her career as the culmination of a lifetime of achievement. Devoney Looser has observed that the conventions of literary history make it difficult to see "all [End Page 125] but the most visible (traditionally, male and canonical) writers across their entire careers."3 Her insight applies with particular force to women writers in the eighteenth century. Their careers are often read through the lens of their opening—think of the all-night tavern-party celebrating the launch of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), for example, or the delight early feminist critics took in the high-spirited verse of the young Elizabeth Singer, whose evolution into the more somber Mrs. Rowe was long resisted. Accounts of Haywood belong to this pattern. For many students of the period, early Hay-wood is Haywood. The story is familiar: a would-be actress scores a sensational success with Love in Excess and goes on to thrill readers with amatory novellas featuring scenes of full-bodied sensuous experience—tales of "Youth and Inadvertence," in one of her favorite phrases—and eventually draws the wrath of Alexander Pope, all before hitting her mid-thirties. Judging from anthologies and syllabi, it is early Haywood who continues to captivate, Fantomina (1725) especially. Fantomina is a young person's fantasy, a teenaged wonder of learning-by-doing who finds in the playhouse and in a raft of disguises scope for unimagined freedoms from family restraint and genteel propriety. Fantomina embodies what many feel to be essential Haywood: her vitality, brilliance, and audacity. My aim is to direct attention toward the vitality, brilliance, and audacity of Haywood in her elder years. To be sure, some works from the late period are already regarded as among her best—Female Spectator and Betsy Thoughtless are up there on anyone's list, and Invisible Spy is gaining a following—but a kind of embarrassment still seeps at times into accounts of the so-called second half of Haywood's career. Until challenged by Paula Backscheider, the "Story" was the story of a career split by one or another "conversion."4 It was said of Haywood—and we dislike the word—that she reformed. In the sentimentalized version of the conversion story delivered by Clara Reeve...