Teaching Eliza Haywood

At some point in the Northern Winter of 2020 (i.e., early 2020, since the Northern Winter runs from ca. December 2019 to March 2020), the Modern Language Association of America will publish Approaches to Teaching the Works of Eliza Haywood, with contributions from twenty-five scholars, myself included.



Among the broad range of Haywood scholars included in this volume, are those who have done so much to make her work available in edited form: Paula R. Backscheider (Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood), Catherine Ingrassia (Anti-Pamela), Tiffany Potter (The Masqueraders and The Surprize), and Earla Wilputte (The Adventures of Eovaai, Three Novellas). Also included are scholars who have made a name for themselves with book-length studies, which have had a significant impact on Haywood studies: Ros Ballaster (Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740), Kathryn R. King (A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood), and Kirsten T. Saxton (The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood).

David Oakleaf—another significant name in Haywood studies—comments that “The pedagogical range and resourcefulness of this volume is impressive. Any teacher of Haywood will benefit from a thorough engagement with the material presented.” I am certainly looking forward to reading the other contrutions, whichI have not yet seen.

* * * * *

My own essay ("Haywood’s Works: Availability, Editing, and Issues of Bibliography") will be in the first section, titled “Materials,” which is intended to identify "high-quality editions, reliable biographical sources, and useful background information." Although I primarily intended my essay to be a history of the availability of Haywood's works—in original editions, various micro-format duplicates, and printed editions, whether in facsimilie or edited form—what I ended up focussing on is the extent to which the growth and focus of Haywood scholarship has depended on the availability of Haywood's works in edited form.

Obviously, for works to be studied at all, they need to be available to a scholar; but for works to be widely studied, they really need to be widely available in edited form. Certainly, for the most part, those works by Haywood which have been the most frequently edited are also the ones that are most frequently discussed in scholarship. However, the correlation is imperfect, suggesting a bias among Haywood scholars for Haywood’s prose fiction and periodicals over her drama, nonfiction, and Haywood's many translations.

What my survey suggested to me is that convenient edited editions of Idalia and The Fatal Secret, for instance, are certainly called for, and would probably encourage more studies of those works, but the developing critical interest in Haywood’s periodicals and longer works of original prose fiction suggest that editions of The Young Lady or The Fortunate Foundlings would do more to expand the range of Haywood scholarship. Publishers take heed!