Cazotte's The Devil in Love

Halloween seems like a good time to do a post on Jacques Cazotte's Le diable amoureux, Nouvelle Espagnole (Naples, 1772), which I am considering including in my Dark Hero unit next time it runs. There have been a few recent editions, one of which has just been reissued, so there should be no difficulty getting the text.

There were four separate translations of this work into English during the high Romantic period. These are:

[1] Alvarez, Or, Irresistible Seduction; A Spanish Tale (London: W. Richardson, 1791). ¶ ESTC: t226198 (recording 2 copies); on ECCO; “When I was five-and-twenty years old, I was a captain in the the King of Naples’ guards: we lived very sociably among ourselves …”

[2] The Devil in Love, Translated from the French (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1793). ¶ ESTC: t71529 (4 copies); on ECCO; “At five and twenty I was a Captain of the Guards in the service of the King of Naples, and lived in gay society …”

[3] The Enamoured Spirit (London: Lee and Hurst, Bell, Millar and J. Wright, 1798). ¶ ESTC: t210676 (2 copies); not on ECCO; “At the age of five-and-twenty I was Captain in the Guards of His Majesty the King of Naples, and kept constant company with my brother officers”

[4] Biondetta, or the Enamoured Spirit (London: J. Miller, 1810). ¶ COPAC and WorldCat record 8 copies: L [1458.d.16] and O [Fic. 27524 e.164]; CaSRU [PQ 1961 C5 A6413 1810]; CtY [Hfd29 151N], DLC [PZ3.C3197 B FT MEADE], MH-H [*EC8 L5875 Y810c], PSt [PQ1961.C5A65 1810], ViU [PZ2.C39 B 1810]; “At the age of five and twenty I was a captain in the guards of the King of Naples.”

As you can see, most of these editions are quite rare.

In addition to these four translations between 1791 and 1810, there have been three modern editions, two of which are new translations:

[5] The Devil in Love (London: Heinemann; Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925). Limited edition (UK: 75 copies; US: 365 copies) ¶ Reprints translation no. 2; available online on Europeana, courtesy of the Bodleian Library (direct link to PDF here)

[6] The Devil in Love, translated by Judith Landry (Dedalus, 1991; 2nd ed. 2011). ¶ “At the age of twenty-five I was a captain of the king's Guards at Naples; we kept our own company much of the time …”

[7] The Devil in Love. Followed by Jacques Cazotte: His Life, Trial, Prophecies, and Revelations by Gerard de Nerval, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (Marsilio, 1993). ¶ “At the age of twenty-five I was a Captain of the Guards in the service of the King of Naples. We lived much of our time …”

Unlike the English, the French have been producing beautifully-illustrated editions of Le diable amoureux since the start (the first edition is illustrated). I will have to get myself a copy of the poetic adaptation by "Gerard de Nerval" [Gérard Labrunie]:

Le diable amoureux, roman fantastique par J. Cazotte, Précédé de sa vie, de son procès, et de ses prophéties et révélations par Gerard de Nerval. Illustré de 200 dessins par Edouard de Beaumont (Paris, Léon Canivet, 1845).

The Beaumont illustrations were reprinted in 1871 by H. Plon and copies of that reprint are fairly common. But there are some stunning private-press editions from the twentieth century that I would like to get too, with illustrations by Paul-Émile Bécat (1936), Maurice Leroy (1946), André Michel (1950), Michel Jamar (1960), Jean Traynier (1966) and—undoubtedly—others.

According to Joseph Andriano, the most reliable edition of the French text is in Romanciers du XVIIIe siecle, edited by Etiemble et Marguerite du Cheyron, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Pleiade, 1965), 303–78. However, there are two other modern editions of the French text: those edited by Max Milner (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979) and Georges Décote (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).

* * * * *

As for why I would consider this novel for the Dark Hero unit … well, I was persuaded to do so by the chapter in Andriano's Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction (1993), 10, which mounts a strong argument for The Devil in Love as the first conte fantastique: the first fantasy.

Nothing quite like Cazotte's work had appeared before, even though its temptation plot, with its prototype in the life of St. Anthony, was familiar to all Catholics. The text seems a curious hybrid of several popular genres of the time—contes licencieux, contes morales, contes defees—but it has long had the reputation of being the first of a new genre—le conte fantastique, not only in Todorov's narrow sense of reader hesitation but in a broader one: Cazotte simply added the mimetic techniques of realism, already apparent in some fabliaux and contes, to the marvelous. The result was an exquisitely ambiguous work in which a fairly ordinary young man is confronted with both the supernatural and the perfectly natural "realistic" problem of choosing a mate. Le Diable amoureux may also be considered Gothic in that term's broadest sense. It has the trappings—ruins, diabolism, sexual pursuit—and it gives a little frisson.
  With elements of all these genres Le Diable amoureux had something to please almost everyone: humor, light titillation, periodic chills, and moral messages. Only a thoroughly ambiguous work could provide such conflicting needs.

 UPDATE 13 December 2012: while searching through the New York Society Library's Hammond Collection I stumbled upon a New York edition of The Devil in Love from 1810. A search on WorldCat shows that I also missed Boston editions of 1828 and 1830. These three editions should have appeared above as nos.5–7, pushing the total number of editions to nine.

Although some of these American editions are available in microformat—the 1810 edition is on microopaque—I have not been able to look at any of them yet. Once I have, I will update the above list identifying the translations used in America. (Given the choice of title for the 1810 edition, it seems most likely that they are all reprints of no.2—the 1793 edition.)

[UPDATE 10 December 2014: added ESTC numbers, availability on ECCO, etext of no. 5, and call numbers of no. 4.]

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared again I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]

Publicity for BSRE, Paul and I (at Monash)

There was some welcome publicity at Monash for Paul Watt and I following the publication of our Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period. There were two articles, issued a few weeks apart, under the same name (but slightly different in content) issued in Monash's Latest News and Monash Memo.

The two stories are Frisky songsters uncovered (21 September 2011) and Frisky songsters uncovered (5 October 2011). The Memo article was ccompanied by a bio piece under the title Getting to know ... Patrick Spedding. There was a similar profile of Paul done last year under the title 60 seconds with … Dr Paul Watt (14 April 2010).

Hunting around for the above links, I found the URL for an article about my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood which appeared five year's ago in Monash Memo: Haywood bibliography wins modern language award (29 November 2006). This page would appear every time I used Google to check something on my Monash profile page, but it disappeared a few years ago and I assumed the page had been taken down.

Editing, A Quixotic Academic Activity

I have been asked to expand on my comment (here) that "the actual editing of primary texts does not count as academic activity in any way in the eyes of government bean-counters." I am happy to oblige (but NB my caveat at the foot of this post). I mentioned this in my blog entry on Haywood's The City Widow as one of the reasons not to publish The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood with an academic or commercial publisher.

The monitoring of academic activity has become ubiquitous in universities worldwide. In Australia the branch of the federal government that manages the higher education sector is the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR). Every year DIISR demands an account of research activity via the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC). (DIISR also monitors student numbers, undergraduate and postgraduate teaching etc.)

I did the HERDC for a couple of years when I was a postgraduate, and I have been filling in forms for the HERDC for as long as I have been publishing—though the acronym keeps changing. I preferred DEST—The Department of Education, Science and Training—which was easier to pronounce and actually contained the word "Education," implying the government is not ashamed of everything it does outside of the sciences in schools, colleges and universities.

Anyway, the current DIISR HERDC categories define what can and cannot be claimed as academic activity. The four "DEST-able" categories are defined as

A1 Books - Authored Research (Commercial Publisher)
B1 Book Chapters - Commercial Publisher
C1 Journal Article - Refereed Scholarly Journal
E1 Conference Publication - Full Paper Refereed

There are also many non-DEST-able categories (now non-DIISR-able categories. DIISR-able sounds like "miserable" I guess). These include

A2 Books - Authored Other (Non-Commercial Publisher)
A3 Book Editorship & Edited Compilation (claimed by editor/s)
A4 Book Revision or New Edition

with a similar alphanumeric series for Major Reviews (D), Audio Visual Recording (F), Computer Software (G), Refereed Design (H), Patents (I), Original Creative Work (J), Research Reports (K), Theses (L), Performances (M), Expert Commentary (N) and "Other Publication Categories" (O).

So, "editing of primary texts does not count as" an A1 (Authored Research, Commercial Publisher), which is set aside for monographs like my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. (Though, an A1 excludes many types of reference works, such as enumerative bibliographies, dictionaries and encyclopedias; which is why colleagues in other schools disputed whether my 840-page Bibliography actually counted as "research activity." It was only when I challenged them to read the 65,744 words in my 2,093 footnotes to judge for themselves whether the text was actually "research" that they "let it pass"!)

If I had published my Bibliography with Lulu, it would have been an A2 (Non-Commercial Publisher). Interestingly (where "interestingly" means "disgustingly"), my esteemed colleague Brian McMullin, who has published many important works in the prestigious Harvard Library Bulletin, had an A1 application for his Title-Labels in British Books dismissed, though it was issued with an ISBN as well as an ISSN, on the basis that Harvard Library was not a commercial publisher. And this because the did not have an internet page that solicited manuscripts of all sorts for publication—unlike Harvard University Press.

If I were to published the second edition of my Bibliography with Pickering & Chatto, it would be an A4 (Book Revision or New Edition). Of course I won't do that—and I will dance naked down the street when the copyright returns to me in 2014—but if I were to do it, it would be an A4. I will get to A3s in a minute.

But, to be clear, only an A1 would be counted for the current DIISR HERDC and, until recently, this meant that only an A1 would shake the money tree. (The exact funding mechanism is way too complicated to explain here.) In recent times, however, we have had RQF (Research Quality Framework) and ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia). Both the RQF, which was modelled on the British RAE, and ERA (Son of RQF), are metrics-based assessments that take in broader research activity.

I have vented before on the rank stupidity, the cretinous imbecility, of crudely applying a misconceived journal ranking and bibliometric/citation-count model on research activity in the humanities, so I won't do it again here (ERA: Damned Lies and Bibliometrics; Evidence of Impact, A Decade Later; Script & Print Indexed by Scopus). But it is with enormous pleasure that I can say that a courageous colleague of mine in English (she is in the next office to me), helped topple the idol by investigating the ranking of a few journals with a well-applied Freedom of Information application. Well done Anna! (see Kim Carr bows to rank rebellion over journal rankings).

Despite complains and the occasional victory, the monitoring of academic activity will continue. And, in fact, a wider view of what constitutes academic activity is a good thing. Far better to have A1–4 than just A1. Which brings me to A3 and the editing of primary texts. The four "DEST-able" categories bring money, but the cumulative impact of all the non-DEST-able categories, is to bring money too, just not as directly or clearly. The amount each of the big four publication categories bring is fairly well known, in round terms; but if our ERA/RQf profile diminishes, so does our funding. So, universities are now keen to record everything.

What this means for an individual like me is that, after years of having my editorial activity completely and utterly ignored and invisible, the university and the Federal Government might now be modestly, grudgingly, interest, or prepared to record my academic activity in the not-very-great hope that it might make a modest impact (somewhat like a drop of pigeon shit adds to the height of Nelson's Column).

And by editorial activity I am talking about all the things that are required for one to publish a five-volume collection of facsimile texts with annotations and introductions by leading scholars in the field (Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Part I and Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Part II) or a five-volume collection of transcribed and edited texts with annotations and introductions by leading scholars in the field (Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period).

That is, seeing the need, and examining the competition, for a work; selecting the contents and drafting a formal proposal; negotiating with the press to take on the project and persuading a group of busy scholars to spend the time reading and annotating a series of texts and to write an introduction, and navigating all the legal, technical and intellectual challenges involved in seeing such a project to publication: from advising editors on stylistic matters through to vetting advertising copy.

When ECBE I (2002) and ECBE II (2004) were published, I was told that edited collections of texts "do not count" (as academic activity). At all. There is no form for them and no place for the data in any database. By way of consolation, I was informed that there were many things that academics did that did not count, and that the DEST collection (as it was then) selective, the assumption being that, if a section/school/faculty/university was strong in its A1s, B1s, C1s and E1s, then they would also be doing all these other things too, and would be remunerated as they ought to be, though they were selective in the information they collected and the types of activity they were interested in. I did not find this terribly persuasive then and it has been increasingly obvious since that this is hogwash.

The universities put pressure on staff to perform academic activity that "counts"—that is visible to DIISR. As the same consoling staff member explained some years later in the lead up to the imposition of RQF, universities had become so fixated on what "counts" under the DEST system that the system had to be changed. He predicted that the same thing would occur with the RQF and that, in time, it would also have to be changed for the same reason: that like mice in an cage, the universities will keep pressing the money pedal until they starve. (Some would argue that they do this because they are starving already.)

When Senator Carr ditched the journal ranking element of ERA he did so because journal ranking "was focusing ill-informed, undesirable behaviour in the management of research." Quite right. The announcement was unexpected and exquisitely timed. I'll refrain from quoting the internal Monash email in question, but not one week earlier all staff received a missive advising them not to publish in C-ranked journals (despite many outstanding academic journals being—inexplicably, contentiously—ranked C). As Anna explained

Journal rankings were being instrumentalised, being taken into our performance management assessments, and you have to cite your journal rankings in grant applications to the ARC. If you have three articles in C-ranked journals it is automatically considered not to be research of the same quality as if they were in A-ranked journals and that has career implications.

It is still the case that all academic staff are required to have accrued a certain number of DEST/DIISR points per calendar year (a C1 is worth 1 point, an A1 is 5 points) and the number of DEST/DIISR points a staff member has is entered into their workload equation to determine how much teaching they must do.**

So, if a staff member was foolish enough to spent two years hammering away in their role as general editor of a five volume collection of edited texts—a collection that might be instrumental in opening up an entire field of research, which may redefine a discipline—they would be in danger of being disciplined in their performance management for failure to perform and drowning in teaching, because such a labour would not reduce their workload by the smallest measurable fractional of an EFSTU (equivalent full time student units) or EFTSL (equivalent full-time student load).

So, beside the indignity of having a core activity in literary studies disregarded in the definition of academic activity, these two instruments (performance management and workload) guarantee that staff are aware that the "editing of primary texts" is basically a hobby, like maintaining a blog. Or knitting.

With the advent of ERA (Son of RQF) universities now do give a pinch of goat-shit about this hobby and I have been torturing the professional staff with this puzzler: how do we classify my hobby, sorry, my publications? Which brings us back to A3, which may comprise any of the following:

• edited books, including revised or new editions of edited books which are substantially different from the preceding book, and editorship of major reference works; these may be edited books, monographs or short series of volumes consisting of contributions from a number of authors

• editorship of a scholarly or professional journal controlled by an editorial board with its contributions subject to peer review.

• edited volumes of conference proceedings in which one or more staff members are identified as having editorial responsibility for the proceedings.

It appears that this will work, though some of the DEST-trained old guard are (naturally) unsure, and want to see footnotes and bibliographies—physical manifestations of intellectual labour.

(On a happy side-note, this A3 definition also seems to cover my three years as editor of an academic journal: Script and Print.)

The eligibility criteria for an A3 also explains that

• edited books may be either from commercial or non commercial publishers

And so, if I were to edit The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood, despite the fact that such a quixotic undertaking would have a negative impact on my performance management and my workload, there is no incentive to seek a commercial or an academic/commercial publisher.

* * * * *

**Regarding workload equations: administrators pretend that staff spend 40% of their time on teaching, 40% on research and 20% on admin. Ignoring, for a moment, the fact that this is a fantasy with school-wide average of a 140% workload: "research" includes honours, masters and doctoral supervision. In fact, it is largely made up of this alone. Obviously, patently, self-evidently, honours, masters and doctoral supervision is not research. At all. It is teaching, teaching about research, facilitating the publication of research by someone else, but it isn't research.

The maximum number of points that can be counted as research based on publications (i.e., actual research, not teaching, but measured with only DEST-able publications) is five of forty points (for me, the numbers are higher for Professors etc). What this really means is five of fifty-six points or 11.2% when the school-wide workload average of 140% is taken into account. And note, that to get these five points one would have to publish a book (an A1) every year.

Also note, that the difference between doing the academic equivalent of treading water or undertaking a full triathlon—pounding out a book every year—is four points, and the average workload overload is the equivalent of sixteen points (four times this difference). So you can see what I mean when I say pretend: the four points are so utterly insignificant in this scheme as to be beneath comment. So, under the present workload model there is no incentive to undertake genuine research and, in as much as there is any incentive at all, it is only to do DEST-able research.

(Of course, in this post I am only talking about workload and publications-counting: bean-counting. If anyone were to actually push out a monograph a year they would be carried around the campus on the shoulders of an admiring crowd. And my colleagues have greeted the various collections I have edited with the recognition they deserved. Likewise, my various publications have been recognised in my appointment as co-director of the Centre for the Book and, indeed, were acknowledged in my ARC success and my Monash appointment. But when deciding what to do as an academic and considering the lack of incentive to seek out a commercial publisher for The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood …)

ECCO-TCP and the Future of Junk OCR

More than two years ago I predicted (here) that the clean texts generated by ECCO-TCP (Eighteenth Century Collections Online Text Creation Partnership) would eclipse the sort of junk OCR texts generated by the mass low-resolution scanning of books (Google Books) and high-resolution scanning of microfilms (ECCO, EEBO, Burney etc). Sadly, it looks like I was wrong!

Mandell is undoubtedly right: proprietary but junk OCR of the variety that has been thus far generated by mass microfilm scanning projects is doomed. Only clean, open-access texts will be used, copied, swapped and survive the myriad hardware and software changes of the coming decades; changes that will inevitable consign ECCO to an even dingier corner of the library than that presently inhabited by microcard readers.

Last month, Rebecca Welzenbach (the TCP Outreach Librarian) gave a conference paper under the title "Making the most of free, unrestricted texts–a first look at the promise of the Text Creation Partnership" (available in pdf here). Welzenbach explains that "ECCO-TCP simply never took off in the same way that EEBO‐TCP did. We could not garner enough support from partner libraries to keep it going, and so in 2009, we had to call it to a halt."

The funding model for ECCO-TCP (like EEBO-TCP) was for [1] database owners to grant use of page images; which were [2] "manually keyboarded" and encoded. This work was paid for by partner-libraries who [3] gained immediate access to the text, but could not distribute the same for five years so that the publishers could [4] sell access to non-partner libraries during that time.

According to Welzenbach only "a small number" of partner-libraries signed up, Gale wasn't able to sell the texts, and so almost nobody had access to them. By mid-2010 the ECCO-TCP was wound up and over two thousand texts were released to the hoi polloi.

There are various ways of gaining access to these files (listed here). I tried and gave up on a few sites (including 18thConnect, the first site mentioned by Welzenbach), but I can strongly recommend The ARTFL Project website hosted by the University of Chicago (here).

If you search the ECCO-TCP text files for "Eliza Haywood" for example you get a list of 41 results, giving a snippet of text with a series of links offering you links to the page, paragraph, SubSect[ion] and Section; this is followed by a "Results Bibliography" that links to each text. Follow the link to an item in the bibliography and you get an index page for that text allowing you to browse the text.

The quality of the transcripts is quite high (some punctuation marks are missed and lines, and occasionally words, are broken that ought to run on), so it is very disappointing that there are no Haywood texts.

Returning to my rash prediction: was I right to predict that high-quality texts like these will triumph over the junk OCR offered by Google Books (for free) and ECCO (for a fee)? I am still inclined to think so, though this particular funding model failed.

ECCO is a lot larger than EEBO and there is (frankly) a lot more chaff in it, or the chaff is less interesting than that from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Also, although the texts selected seem to be representative, they are also, for the most part, a rather predictable and less interesting lot of texts than they could have been.** So, it is possible that ECCO-TCP failed to find a market (and partners) simply because the text selection was dull and uninspiring.

**Not only are there no Haywood texts, there appears to be little early prose fiction, and few or no "secret histories," novels, or romances. The fact that 12 of the 41 results in my Haywood search are from Richard Savage and Alexander Pope alone is consistent with a similar search of eighteenth-century texts on Google Books.

Also, although EEBO-TCP has been successful, I personally think the publication model is faulty: getting big bucks from big institutions is always going to be difficult, particularly at present. And the bigger the contribution demanded, the more elitist the project becomes, the more sparsely populated the ECCO-TCP user-space is bound to be.

Personally, I prefer a wiki-style publishing model and I'd think it would be more successful with a project like this. That is, ECCO needs to create an interface that allows all subscribers/registered users to edit and correct the raw OCR, transcribed and beta texts. The amount of editorial work that people are prepared to do for free is astonishing, and a project of the size of the ECCO-TCP needs to harness the skills of tens of thousands of users to ever be completed.

Obviously, ECCO would benefit from having corrected texts to search and if the texts (and the opportunity to correct them) were only accessible to ECCO users it could not diminish their subscriber base. In fact, the more the access fees were reduced, and the subscriber base increased, the faster the editing of texts would proceed, to the benefit of everyone involved.

Of course, a similar course of action is open to Google Books, who would benefit from advertising revenue, though Google would need a lot more policing of edits (like there is on Wikipedia) given the difficulty of limiting access to users with the necessary level of education/literacy and/or to prevent malicious edits, spamming, flaming etc.

Eliza Haywood's Reputation before the 20C

When I was preparing my lecture on Eliza Haywood for Anna Poletti's unit on Writing women, I decided to use Google Books to survey Haywood's reputation and representation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What I found was pretty much what I expected to find, but it is interesting.

Results of a search for “Eliza Haywood” in works 1700–1800 (excluding works by Haywood): 40 hits

Main references (30 = 75%)
In works by Alexander Pope: 19 refs = 47.5% (very prominent: 11 of the first 13 hits)
In works by Richard Savage: 7 refs = 17.5% (quite prominent: 7 of the central hits)
Reviews in The Monthly Review: 3 refs = 7.5% (prominent: 3 of the first 14 hits)
Fielding's Memoirs of Grub Street: 1 refs = 2.5%

Passing/incidental references (10 = 25%)
Walpole’s work on engravers: 2 refs = 5%
In the BM Cat. of MS: 2 refs = 5%
In bookseller’s catalogues: 6 refs = 15% (not very prominent, among the last hits)

Basically, Pope and Savage's bile (In The Dunciad, An Author to be Lett and The Authors of the Town) constitutes most of Haywood's reputation and representation in the 18th century. (If we add eighteenth century work first published in the nineteenth century, we can add Swift to this herd of swine [i.e., sexist pigs].) For a sample of the negative, dismissive, outrageous and idiotic statements made about Eliza Haywood in the last two centuries see my Wall of Shame (here).

Of course, if you look harder (under "Mrs Haywood" for example) you can find dissenting voices or, at least, other voices, which I will collect below …

[1758]. Charlotte Lennox, Henrietta, 2 vols. (London, 1758): 36:

"Well," said Mrs. Eccles, "how do you like my books? are they not prettily chosen?"
  "I assure you," replied she, taking down one, "you chose very well when you chose this; for it is one of the most exquisite pieces of humour in our language."
  "I knew you would approve of my taste," said Mrs. Eccles, "but what have you got?—O! the Adventures of Joseph Andrews—Yes; that is a very pretty book, to be sure!—but there is Mrs. Haywood's Novels, did you ever read them?—Oh! they are the finest love-sick, passionate stories; I assure you, you'll like them vastly: pray, take a volume of Haywood upon my recommendation."
  "Excuse me," said Henrietta, "I am very well satisfied with what I have; I have read this book three times already, and yet I assure you, I shall begin it again with as much eagerness and delight as I did at first.

* * * * *

In the nineteenth century, the criticism is only slightly more varied, and that largely due to the increasing number of female writers and critics whose opinions were published.

[1810]. Anna Letitia Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing” (1810):

Mrs. Haywood was a very prolific genius: her earlier novels are in the style of Mrs. Behn's, and Pope has chastised her in his Dunciad without mercy or delicacy; but her later works are by no means void of merit. She wrote The Invisible Spy and Betsy Thoughtless, and was the author of the Female Spectator. But till the middle of the last century, theatrical productions and poetry made a far greater part of polite reading than novels, which had attained neither to elegance nor discrimination of character.

[1811]. Memoirs of the life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, edited by Robert James Mackintosh (1835), 2.105 (22 June 1811):

Female genius always revives Mrs. Barbauld's generous mind. Her remarks on Mrs. Inchbald are excellent; what she says of Madame D'Arblay is excellent; and one sentence, contrasting the rapture of a first success with the languor and disappointment of more advanced years, is beautiful and affecting. Her own remarks are plain, short, and sensible, but have the painful appearance of flowing from a dispirited mind, and present a melancholy contrast with the works of her youth and enthusiasm. She informs me that Mrs. Haywood was the authoress of 'Betsy Thoughtless,' one of the favourites of my youth. She displeases me, by classing the 'Man of Feeling' with a book by Pratt, an imitator of Sterne ….

[1819]. Catherine Hutton, Oakwood Hall (1819), 93–94:

"How came this to find a place in your collection?"
"Indiana Danby! my dear," said Mrs. Oakwood, "is a novel of the middle ages. The shining light of the ancients, such as Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and perhaps Mrs. Haywood, was set; and that of the moderns, such as Dr. Moore, Holcroft, Godwin, Miss Burney, and Miss Edgeworth, not yet risen."

[1844]. Charles Whitehead, Richard Savage: A Romance of Real Life (1844), ch. 15 fn.

Eliza Haywood, although now nearly forgotten, attained during her life-time to an enviable celebrity. Pope, in his Dunciad, has heaped terrible infamy upon her head. Her plays I have not seen; but I have looked into her novels of which "The History of Betsy Thoughtless " and "Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy " are the most considerable. They possess no common degree of merit, but are altogether unfit for modern perusal.

[1864]. Dr. John Doran, “Their Majesties' Servants”: Annals of the English Stage (1864), 1.344:

The "Fair Captive" was an adaptation by Mrs. Haywood, a lady who began by writing as loosely as Aphra Behn, concluded by writing as decorously as Mrs. Chapone, and left charge to her executors, in 1756, to give no aid to any biography of her that might be attempted, on the ground that the least said was the soonest mended.

So, Haywood was, according to her critics (on my Wall of Shame), a "disgraceful," "shameless," "vulgar" and "voluminous writer of indifferent novels" which detail "lascivious passion, rapes, adultery, and murder" and are, as a consequence, "altogether unfit for modern perusal" and "now nearly forgotten." Haywood herself "figures indecently" in the Dunciad—a phrase that elides Haywood's representation and her own putative indecency—and that "the least said" about her, the better.

Alternatively, we have (as here) "a very prolific genius" who "attained during her life-time to an enviable celebrity," and whose "works are by no means void of merit." Indeed, she is, "perhaps," one of the "shining light[s] of" eighteenth-century literature. Her "Betsy Thoughtless " and "Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy" are the most considerable" of her novels and the first of these was "one of the favourites of [the] youth" of Sir James Mackintosh.

Although it is possible to create the second, positive, picture from the evidence above, it is clear from my Wall of Shame and the full quotes above that such a positive portrait is not representative. It is necessary to largely ignore the qualifications offered, and much of the faint praise is offered in double-negative ("by no means void of merit") whereas the criticism is often unqualified and is stated positively.

[UPDATE 26 February 2015]

The City Widow: Or, Love in a Butt

Although the dedication of Ab.44 The City Widow is signed ‘Eliz. Haywood’ it was not identified as being by Haywood in any work of reference until 1972, and it wasn't included in any list of Haywood's works until 1991. It is yet to attract any interest and it remains, basically, invisible (a search on the MLA International Bibliography found no articles that refer to it!).

The invisibility of The City Widow is partly because it is an extremely rare work: there are no copies in the UK, and it was only when the National Union Catalog reached ‘Haywood’ in 1972 that scholars could easily locate the two copies held in the US, at the Clark and Newberry libraries. (To these two can now be added a third, my own [above].)

However, the Clark copy of the first issue has been available on microfilm since the mid-80s and a scan of this microfilm has been available online to much of the academic community for at least five years. So, what gives?

It seems likely that, until The City Widow is widely available in edited form, it will remain invisible for some time. And the chance of it being edited for a commercial publisher at present seems slim. Certainly, it is highly unlikely (i.e., there is no chance) that Pickering and Chatto will extend their collection of Selected Works of Eliza Haywood and I do not know of any other press which is likely to take on such a large editorial project.

(That said, two of Haywood's shorter works will appear in the Chawton House Library series and it is possible that other works, not previously edited, will appear like this over time. However, given that this is the first editorial undertaking in a decade, it will be a very long time—if ever—that Haywood's complete corpus will appear in this haphazard way.)

Since it became clear (by about 2004) that Pickering and Chatto were not interested in extending their Selected Works I have given quite a bit of thought, off and on, to the idea of editing the Complete Works of Eliza Haywood myself, or trying to coordinate the editing of Haywood's complete works.

Clearly, a large project such as this would take many years to complete, even if a number of scholars collaborated on it. Then again, many of the volumes would also be very short and many of the shortest volumes would be the most interesting (at least, from my point of view). Depending on how the project were set up, and how widely the volumes were sold, I'd expect such a project would have quite an rapid impact at graduate level, helping to encourage the study of many of the works by Haywood that remain invisible.

Pickering and Chatto only abandoned the Selected Works of Eliza Haywood for commercial reasons: if they thought they could spin money out of such a project, they would be onto it at once, so it seems unlikely that any other commercial publisher would be any more interested, which leaves only three avenues: a subsidised project, issued by a commercial publisher (I am not sure who—which funding body—would have the funds to subsidise such a large undertaking), a non-commercial academic press (I am not sure any of these survive) or a non-commercial, non-academic press like Lulu.

At present, I prefer Lulu. And, if this were a collaborative undertaking, pursued by Haywood scholars with the intention of making reliable and approachable texts available to students, the fact that Lulu allows the printing of cheap paperbacks (for students) and sturdy hardbacks (for libraries) would have to count in its favour.

And given, as I have discovered recently, that the actual editing of primary texts does not count as academic activity in any way in the eyes of government bean-counters, there is no incentive to seek a commercial publisher, who would only water-down academic standards in editing, restrict circulation for commercial reasons, and be empowered to almost indefinitely limit future access by their control of the copyright.

As for where to start with The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood: to a certain extent the exact title would not matter with a project like this, but the early emphasis would have to be on texts like The City Widow which have, so far, escaped attention merely because they are rare. There are quite a few works by Haywood that are either not available in any form or which are just as rare (such as Ab.24 The Fatal Fondness and Ab.40 The Perplex'd Dutchess). After this would be all other works that are not yet edited and bringing up the rear, works that are available in edited form like Fantomina.

* * * * *

Since I have been thinking of editing The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood for at least a decade, I have long been been collecting and transcribing texts. And now that I have a copy of The City Widow I am in a position to edit it—one of the most pressing cases—as I would like to see all the Haywood texts edited, against a copy of the original. Below is a sample of the text. Any volunteers to edit it?

The Dedication:

To Mrs. Burscoe, Relict of Mr. John Burscoe, Vintner.

Madam,

As diamonds are illustrated by their foils, so virtue appears most bright when compar’d with vice. Your perfections are, indeed, brightly conspicuous of themselves, but when we see an opposite character, in a person of much the same circumstances, they are shown in more true, as |4| well as in more amiable colours. It is in justice therefore to your merit, I lay this little History at your feet, it being impossible to consider the faults of my Widow, without applauding the excellent conduct You have maintain’d, since the death of your justly lamented Spouse. The visible contrast between you, renders this Piece an offering fit for You, and for you alone, and will, I hope, engage a favourable acceptance from her who is,

  With all due Admiration,
    Madam,
      Your humble, and most obedient Servant,
        Eliz. Haywood.

The City Widow: Or, Love in a Butt

Bacchus and Cupid have always been the most intimate of all the Gods, and never fail to assist each other’s Designs. Hymen has a thousand times endeavour’d to breed a difference between then; but they not only rejected his insinuations, but likewise, at last, drove him intirely out of their Society. As soon as he approaches, the amorous and jovial Deities quit their place, and leave him to the reproachful complaints |6| of his unhappy devotees. Bacchalia, who, for many a long year, had languish’d beneath his chains, being happily deliver’d of the burthen, those friendly powers resolv’d to take into their mutual protection; and accordingly inspir’d her with the nicest relish of those pleasures, Love and Wine afford. She now indulg’d herself in rich Tokay, Frontignac and Hermitage, whose generous influence, renewing that vigour the approaches of age had somewhat impair’d, the bounteous God, of tender languishments, presented her with a swain, who wanted no requisite to gratify her amorous fires. He was tall, his limbs admirably proportion’d, his complexion sanguine, had very regular features, and eyes, that bespoke his inclinations of the warmest nature. She no sooner saw him, than she became passionately charm’d with him; but now alas! the malice of Hymen began to show itself, and he was resolv’d to be reveng’d on his Antagonist Deities, in the person of their favourite Bacchalia. He inspir’d the breast of Sylvander, for so the lovely youth was call’d, with desires vastly different from those she was possess’d of. He burn’d, indeed, he rag’d, he long’d for the enjoyment of Bacchalia, but all his wishes tended |7| to marriage, nor had a thought of obtaining her, but by being her husband. He made his addresses, therefore, in the most distant and honourable fashion; testifying by all his words and actions, that his passion was accompany’d with the extreamest respect and veneration; but these note being the qualities she desir’d in him, she set her whole wit at work to embolden him to a more familiar behaviour.

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared again I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]

James Parmentier Portrait of Eliza Haywood

The James Parmentier portrait of Eliza Haywood—engraved by George Vertue—was first published 12 August 1723 as a frontispiece to the "Fifth" edition of Ab.1.5a Love in Excess. The advertisement begins: "This Day is publish’d, (With the Author’s Effigies curiously engraven by Mr. Vertue) …" The Parmentier portrait was next issued—with the same description—as a frontispiece to the Aa.3.0 Secret Histories, Novels and Poems on 23 December 1724, and was reissued in the "Second," "Third" and "Fourth" edition of this collection in 1725, 1732 and 1742.

There were two issues of the first of these five editions, but no copy of the first is known. Of the second (in Aa.2.1 The Works) only one of the thirteen copies listed on ESTC definitely has the portrait (CSmH [357090]), but I am yet to confirm whether or not the National Trust copy recently added to ESTC (ex libris Margaret Luttrell [Dunster Castle]) has the portrait. No copy of the second edition of this portrait is known (from the first edition of SHNP), because no copy of this set has been recorded, but there are thirty-five copies known of the remaining editions. These are listed at the end of this post.

* * * * *

The James Parmentier portrait of Eliza Haywood is described by Alexander Pope thus:

  Fair as before her works she stands confess'd,
  In flow'r'd brocade by bounteous Kirkall dress’d.
  Pearls on her neck, and roses in her hair,
  And her fore-buttocks to the navel bare.

152. Kirkall, the Name of a Graver. This Lady’s Works were printed in four Volumes duod. with her picture thus dressed up, before them.

The features mentioned (a low-cut brocade dress and a rose in her hair) make it clear that Pope had seen the Vertue engraving, or the Parmentier painting on which it is based, before he penned these lines. And, though he mistakes the name of the engraver, it is possible that he records details of the Parmentier portrait (the pearl necklace) which were not included in the Vertue engraving. Of course, Pope may have been just "accessorising his verbal picture with a blazon-tradition cliché befitting his satirical mode," as Janine Barchas claims here.)

Barchas continues:

The beauty spot under Haywood’s right eye; the flower tucked behind her ear; the brazen, direct gaze; the dramatically plunging neckline; the ruffled informality of what appears to be a dressing gown; and the unfastened locks of hair arranged suggestively over both shoulders—all these visual clues make abundantly clear to an Augustan audience that the nature of the accompanying writing is amatory in nature. Like the epistolary conceit of the later novel, the engraving's cameo conceit (the likeness is framed as a private miniature on ivory and pinned to a background with a ribbon) licenses and enhances the intimate nature of the portrait. The result works as clever advertisement. In coarse language, it is a pin-up of the "Great Arbitress of Passion," promising another sensational bodice-ripper to the potential customer.

As this interpretation suggests, and Pope’s description of the plate in The Dunciad (1729) makes clear, Vertue’s image of Haywood is indebted more to the déshabillé portraits of the lovers of swaggering Restoration rakes than to the frontispiece portraits of estimable writers such as Homer, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Milton. Vertue’s Haywood is more Nell Gwyn than Katherine Philips.

* * * * *

A question that I raised in my Bibliography, which is increasingly interesting me, is when and where was the portrait issued, how many times the plate was recut (how many versions of the portrait are there), and where are the surviving copies of this portrait. When I sat down to write my "Appendix L: Portraits of Eliza Haywood" I only had access to two, very poor, copies of the portrait, which were on microfilm (the 1725 and 1742 portraits, below).

Nothing much has improved in ten years. There were no clear copies of Haywood's portrait readily available online until I posted them on this blog this week. Ironically, I obtained the high resolution images I have posted above from online sources, but the images were in inaccessible places, and invisible to search engines. Hopefully, they will now be readily discovered and widely used.

* * * * *

In addition to copies of the portrait that survive in the five editions listed above and below, there are likely to be a number of copies which have been separated from one of these editions. One such is at the National Portrait Gallery in London (here).
[UPDATE 12 July 2015: two more are in the Royal Collection, catalogued at RCIN (656107 and 656108)]
The NPG copy survives in a Grangerised set of the eight volumes of The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768–1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis, 2 vols. (1889) and The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay 1778–1840, 6 vols (1904). These two works have been expanded with "approximately 2,700 engraved portraits and topographical views, plus other reproductions, drawings and some manuscript material" (inflating them to an amazing "25 folio volumes"!). The Haywood portrait—a copy of which I have ordered—is in vol. 1, pt. 1.

It is quite likely there are more to be located in Grangerised sets like these. If for no other reason, Mark Noble and James Granger encouraged it by including an entry for Haywood in their A Biographical History of England, from the Revolution to the End of George I's Reign (1806), 3.311 (Class 9 [Class 8 below is a typo]: "Men of Genius and Learning" here).

* * * * *

Nine copies of the third edition (in the 2nd ed. of SHNP): L [12612.ee.8]; O [Harding M 238; Vet. A4 f.159]; CtY-S [Ik.H336.C725b], DLC [PR3506.H94.A68 1725], IU [v.1–2 only], NNHuC, NNU-F [Brit.], PU [Singer-Mend.823.H339].

Eleven copies of the fourth edition (in the 3rd ed. of SHNP): L [12612.ee.11], Olmh [823.59 65]; CaOHM [B14525–28], FU [823.5.H427s 1732], ICN [Case Y 1565.H32], IaU [PR3506 .H94 1732], IU [Nickell x823 H33S1732], MNS [825 H329s 1732], MnU [Wilson 824H33 I], NhD [825 H33 M], NIC [Rare Books PR3506.H94 A72 1732].

Fifteen copies of the fifth edition (in the 4th ed. of SHNP): L [12614.c.13], BRG [BC823.69], REu [Reserve 823.59 HaY], LEu; CaBVaS [PR 3506 H94 A1 1742 v.1–4], CLU-C [*PR3506.H94A1 1742], CtY-S [Ik H336 C725d], DLC [RB 35], ICU [PR3506. H91 1724], IU [x823 H33S], MdBJ-P [823 H427S c. 1, -v.2], MH [15493.16.29.5], MiU, MnU [824.H33 I]; EuGG [8 FAB IX, 1080].

From this it appears that there are only two libraries in the world where it is possible to compare three editions of this portrait (L and IU) and three where it is possible to compare two editions (CtY-S, DLC and O). There are twenty-one copies in the US, nine in the UK, two in Canada and one in Europe. And none in Australia. Yet.

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared again I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]

Eliza Haywood's Fantomina (1725)

[the 1st edition (1725)]

Fantomina is one of Haywood's most interesting works and, as Aleksondra Hultquist comments, is coming to be one of her best known works. It was published three times in the eighteenth-century in the high-profile collection Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems (1724, 1732, 1742) and is presently available in many forms.

(Since I am giving a lecture about Haywood and Fantomina this week I went looking for a copy of the text to re-read. To my inexpressible joy I discovered that I had copies of all three eighteenth-century editions! This post is illustrated with a few pictures I took of these three books. Of course, Monash students have access to digital versions of these three eighteenth-century editions via ECCO here.)

Before 2004—when my Bibliography was published—Fantomina had been reprinted many times: in facsimile (once) in anthologies (four/five times), on CD-Rom (once) and online (three times: once to subscribers and twice open-access on the internet). The relevant entries in my Bibliography are:

[Be.3]. Masquerade Novels of Eliza Haywood. Introduction by Mary Anne Schofield (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1986). Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, v.412. [ISBN: 0-8201-1412-X]. Reproduces ICN copy.

[Ba.2]. Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730: An Anthology, edited by Paula R. Backscheider and John Richetti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). [ISBN: 0-19-871136-0].

[Ba.8]. Eliza Haywood, Fantomina and Other Works, edited by Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery and Anna C. Patchias (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004), 41–72 [partly available here]

[Bb.2]. "Fantomina: Or Love in a Maze," in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, Second Edition, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), 206–24.

[Bb.3.1]. "Fantomina: Or, Love in a Maze," in British Literature, 1640–1789: An Anthology, edited by Robert DeMaria Jr (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 786–803.

[Bb.3.2]. "Fantomina: Or, Love in a Maze." in British Literature, 1640–1789: An Anthology, Second Edition, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 602–16.

[Bh.2]. Eighteenth Century Fiction: A Full-Text Database of English Prose Fiction from 1700 to 1780, edited by Doctors Judith Hawley, Tom Keymer and John Mullan (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1996). One CD-ROM.

[Bi.1]. http://lion.chadwyck.com/. Access available to subscribers only.

[Bj.1]. http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/fantomina.html. Edited by Jack Lynch. [available online here]

[Bj.2]. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/haywood/fantomina.html. Edited by Laura Dziuban and Mary Mark Ockerbloom. [available online here]

* * * * *

[the 2nd edition (1732)—despite what the title-page says!]

Since 2004 Fantomina has appeared in more anthologies (twice) and freely on the internet (once). The relevant details are

The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume 3: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, edited by Joseph Laurence Black (2006): 514–28 (partly available here and the 2011 edition here)

The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1C: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, edited by David Damrosch and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (2006): 3081–92 (details here).

The one new online edition, edited by Alok Yadav, is an annotated pdf version.

There have also been two translations of Fantomina (see pictures at the end of this post). The first is in a collection of three works translated into Spanish by Tamara Gil Somoza from the Backscheider and Richetti collection Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730 (1996). The title of this collection is Mujeres de principios. Tres novelas cortas de autoras inglesas de los siglos XVII y XVIII (Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2008) [available from Amazon here].

The second translation is into Galician(!), along with The British Recluse. The details of this translation are: A dama solitaria e Fantomina de Eliza Haywood, translation by M. Fe González Fernández (Santiago de Compostela: Sotelo Blanco y Xunta de Galicia, 2010). [NB, in the Wikipedia List of languages by number of native speakers Galacian is in position 147 of 152 languages, with 3–4 million speakers] The introduction to this edition is by the very generous Jorge Figueroa Dorrego, who very kindly sent me a copy when I contacted him about this translation.

(Of the print editions, Monash has Ba.2, Ba.8, Bb.2, Bb.3.1 and Bh.2—which is now part of Bi.1 i.e., online. What became of the CD-ROMs is anyone's guess.)

Only three of the print editions appear to be still available. For Amazon listings see here, here and here. But, because the text is online, it is also available as a print-on-demand "edition" from a number of printer-publishers.

* * * * *

In terms of online criticism, there is some interesting informal criticism, amateur and student comment on blogs here, here, here, here and here.

Only one of the twelve articles listed on Google Scholar is freely available online and it is Andrea K. Gill, "Objectifying Men: Gulliver’s Travels, Fantomina, and the Dildo in Eighteenth-Century Literature," Pursuit: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee 2:1 (2011), Article 11, available here but there is also Juliette Merritt, "Peepers, Picts, and Female Masquerade: Performances of the Female Gaze in Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze, in Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators (2004), 45–72 (partly available here) and Melbourne's own Haywood expert, Aleksondra Hultquist, has a section on Fantomina too: "Fantomina and the Role, within the Role, within the Role" in Equal Ardor: Female Desire, Amatory Fiction, and the Recasting of the Novel, 1680–1760 (2008), 94–104. (partly available here).

Wikipedia has reasonable entries for Haywood and Fantomina. For links to online criticism of Haywood's work and discussion of her works, contemporary biographical accounts etc, see all the links I collect on my main Haywood page here.

* * * * *

[the 3rd edition (1742)]

Probably because Fantomina was not separately published in the eighteenth-century, there is practically no mention of the work in print before 1915 when modern Haywood criticism begins. A search of Google Books produces nothing.

ECCO searches produce a few references to copies listed in circulating library catalogues (it is in the Crane-Court Circulating Library catalogue of 1748, Palmer and Merrick's Circulating Library catalogue of 1795 and Earle's Circulating Library catalogue of 1799).

There are also four copies listed in auction catalogues. A few of these auction catalogue name collectors, but they are a fairly unreliable guide to actual ownership since booksellers combined collections and salted named collections with their own stock. With this warning in mind, it is still interesting to see copies of Haywood's Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems and, therefore, of Fantomina in the following catalogues:

Bibliotheca Elegans: A Catalogue of the Large and Valuable libraries of Horsemandon Turner … Peter Dobree … and of the Rev. Mr. White (1754), 112 (no. 3297) [1742 ed.]

A Catalogue of a Large Collection of Useful and Valuable Books … with several other Libraries and Parcels of Books, All Lately Purchased (1762), 87 (no. 2380) [1725 ed.]

A Catalogue of above seven thousand volumes … including the libraries of her Grace the Dutchess of Dorset (1769), 58 (no. 1418) [1725 ed.]

A Catalogue of the Magnificent and Celebrated Library of Maffei Pinelli, Late of Venice (1789), 22 (no. 630) [1725 ed.].

* * * * *

[from left to right: my copies of the 1742, 1725 and 1732 editions
of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems, vol. 3]

About a dozen copies of each of the eighteenth-century editions of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems survive, a few less of the 1732 edition and a few more of the 1742 edition. So, until the 70s there were few places you could read this text. In 1970 an edition of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems appeared in The Library of English Literature microfilm collection (film no. 21503–504)—but very few libraries had it, and none of them in Australia. In 1978 this collection appeared on microfilm again, in Early British Fiction: Pre-1750 (No. 274)—which a few libraries did buy, including only Monash and The University of WA in Australia. So, access was not considerably widened since the number of libraries that had a microfilm was not many more than those that had an eighteenth-century copy!

By the mid-80s this had changed somewhat. The Eighteenth Century microfilm series began in 1982—and Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems appeared almost immediately (on film 232). Much more important, considering how irksome it is to read anything on microfilm, was the Scholars’ Press facsimiles reprint of 1986. Like the Early British Fiction and Eighteenth Century microfilm editions, these facsimiles were bought by only a small number of institutions (two in Australia, Melbourne and Sydney Universities), but unlike the microfilms, they were easily obtained on inter-library loan and photocopied.

So it is not really a coincidence that a series of ground-breaking studies of women's writing began to appear in the mid-80s, just as it became possible for more than a tiny number of privileged scholars to read works like Fantomina. After a decade of increased access and growing interest a number of editors were prompted to include this work in collections of texts aimed at university students: three appeared in 1996 alone and—in the same year—the first digital version of the text was published. Since then there has been a fairly steady stream of new editions, print and digital and it is probably safe to say that from 1996—certainly for the last decade—there has been no significant barrier to obtaining a copy of the text. With increased awareness of, and exposure to, the text, there has been more discussion of it in scholarly journals, which has made it easier to teach, further multiplying readers, interest etc. The recent spate of blog entries and online discussion can only fuel further interest.

Of course, this development is very pleasing to feminist literary scholars. But the scholarship on Haywood's works is still in its infancy. Only a very small number of her works have attracted the sort of editorial and critical attention Fantomina has received. The vast majority of her works have not been edited at all and are not available in student editions—some are not available in any form—monographs on Haywood can still be carried in one hand, and there has not been a biography for almost a century.

But how can it be otherwise? It can take two or three years for each editorial and research project to be completed and for criticism to appear. (Or, as in my case almost a decade!) This means that the scholarly wheels have only turned three or four times since 1996. Still, it seems likely, as Haywood scholarship continues to mature and diversify, that Fantomina will still continue to attract a large share of the attention and that it will remain one of her best known works.

[A Spanish translation of Fantomina published in 1996]

[A Galician translation of Fantomina published in 2010]

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared again I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]