A Spy on Eliza Haywood

Addresses to a Multifarious Writer

Aleksondra Hultquist, Chris Mounsey, Aleksondra Hultquist, Chris Mounsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000425604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Eliza Haywood was one of the most prolific English writers in the Age of the Enlightenment. Her career, from Love in Excess (1719) to her last completed project The Invisible Spy (1755) spanned the gamut of genres: novels, plays, advice manuals, periodicals, propaganda, satire, and translations. Haywood's importance in the development of the novel is now well-known.

A Spy on Eliza Haywood links this with her work in the other genres in which she published at least one volume a year throughout her life, demonstrating how she contributed substantially to making women's writing a locus of debate that had to be taken seriously by contemporary readers, as well as now by current scholars of political, moral, and social enquiries into the eighteenth century.

Haywood's work is essential to the study of eighteenth-century literature and this collection of essays continues the growing scholarship on this most important of women writers.

1 Eliza Haywood and the Deluded Heroine Plot

Rachel Carnell

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198000-1

When Elizabeth Bennet cries out, “Till this moment, I never knew myself,” recognizing the moral worth of Darcy and the worthlessness of Wickham, she is performing the trope of what I label the “deluded heroine” plot—a subgenre of the courtship plot in which the heroine must recognize her own mistakes before being rewarded with the novel’s hero.¹ Rather than blaming outside circumstances for her mistaken judgment, Elizabeth lays the blame squarely on herself: “She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.” She further concludes that “vanity, not love” was the main source of her “folly,” having been “pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other.”²

While we may think of this as a classic scene, it is certainly not timeless or universal. The traditional obstacles in early modern courtship plots were more likely to have been parental obstruction, enacted tragically in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or comically in Congreve’s Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d (1692), in which parents’ prior prescribed choices unexpectedly align with romantic pairings inaugurated incognito at a masquerade ball. More than a century later, in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Fitzwilliam Darcy is not constrained by his parental or familial preferences since both his parents are dead and his aunt has no control over his fortune. Elizabeth Bennett’s moment of self-recognition is thus not precisely in the tradition of Incognita, but follows more directly from Eliza Haywood’s The History of Betsy Thoughtless (1751), in which the eponymous heroine (an orphan) comes to recognize, after a few years of vain adolescent behavior, “in a true light all the mistakes she had been guilty of.” Before being rewarded with Mr. Trueworth, Betsy first has to experience an unpleasant first marriage and witness the death of her first husband (while Trueworth suffers the death of his first wife). But her initial mistake in undervaluing is, as her narrator forewarns at the start of the novel, prompted by “vanity.”³ The larger problem is misapprehension, or delusion, in Betsy’s case, a preference for the accoutrements of fake status and flattery rather than the solid virtue of Mr. Trueworth. Elizabeth Bennet, who (at age twenty) does not suffer from (fifteen-year-old) Betsy’s style of adolescent vanity, must nevertheless learn to discern Darcy’s superior virtue against Wickham’s charm.

The deluded heroine plot, I argue, emerged in British fiction in the mid-eighteenth century, following the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), the fall of Robert Walpole in 1742, and the failed Jacobite rising of 1745. While Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless may appear to offer an apolitical depiction of vanity-induced female misapprehension, in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), likely influenced by Haywood’s novel from the previous year, female delusion is rendered through the Quixotian problem of taking romance literally, in an era when an overly romantic view of the world was associated with the Jacobite cause. In other words, neither of these novels should be presumed to be apolitical. Lennox’s novel appeared in March 1752, just five months after the four-volume set of Betsy Thoughtless. Both Betsy Thoughtless and The Female Quixote were still being reprinted at the start of the nineteenth century and would have been readily available in the lending libraries of Jane Austen’s era. While Austen adapted the deluded heroine plot for her own moral and political purposes in the aftermath of the French Revolution over half a century later, in the year that Haywood’s version of the courtship plot first swept onto the London publishing scene, Britain was still recovering from the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, an event of interest to Haywood and Lennox, who were both alert to the potential romantic appeal of Jacobite ideology.⁴

The inaugurators of the deluded heroine plot were clearly responding to the ideological divides in mid-eighteenth-century British politics although their novels would later be known as morally didactic but not overtly political. Haywood’s and Lennox’s deluded heroines also emerged in response to the phenomenon of Richardson’s Pamela, whose virtuous yet unerringly skeptical protagonist seamlessly yokes emergent Whig hegemony to rural Tory tradition: because Pamela is never deluded, she never has to berate herself for falling prey to either naïvely Whig or naïvely Tory ideology.

Eliza Haywood’s response to Pamela’s harmonious vision of a Whig-Tory hegemony may in part be understood through her inauguration of the deluded heroine plot in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, but that novel is only one piece of Haywood’s complex answer to Richardson. Haywood’s initial response to the ever-virtuous Pamela, of course, was the self-confidently immoral and deceptive Syrena Tricksy in Anti-Pamela; or, Feign’d Innocence Detected (1741). Haywood then followed with the supremely virtuous Louisa in The Fortunate Foundlings (1744). The eponymous heroine of The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753) is likewise virtuous and clearsighted. Thus, even as we credit Haywood with the invention of the deluded heroine plot, we must recognize that her preferred plotline was of the never-deluded heroine, one who saw through the romantic and political delusions of the men around her. Although best known to history as the apparently apolitical author of Betsy Thoughtless, the epitome of the deluded heroine plot, Haywood’s more significant contributions to this vein of literary history are her undeluded heroines, whose unerring moral behavior often mirrors loyalty to an opposition political cause.

Pamela and Anti-Pamela

Richardson’s Pamela serves as a baseline to the development of the deluded heroine plot through its thoroughly undeluded eponymous protagonist. Pamela’s triumph depends on continually seeing through Mr B’s web of deceit in his attempts to trick her into an illegal clandestine marriage—in a novel published one decade before the passage of Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, designed to prevent clandestine marriages.⁵ In a study of marriage-plot novels from this era, Lisa O’Connell has argued that the increasing focus of novels on marriage in the mid-eighteenth century often offered “a Tory critique of the Whig-controlled state which insisted upon the centrality to the social imaginary of the landed estate presided over by vicars and squires.” O’Connell believes that the mid-eighteenth-century marriage plot “develops out of tense constitutional relations between the Anglican Church and the British state, as well in response to the ongoing public debates over the regulation of weddings.”⁶ As she points out, “Tories emphasized not just the independence but the spiritual and pastoral vitality and orthodoxy of church life, based primarily in rural rather than urban England.” Tories were responding to a Whiggish Church hierarchy and to a patronage system in which “vicars became increasingly connected by family to the gentry” so that “squire and parson were increasingly allied.”⁷ O’Connell’s focus is on the depiction of the act of marriage—particularly, for example, in Pamela, in which Pamela insists on marriage in a church or a chapel, rather than a private house. What is central in Pamela’s insistence on this detail, I would add, is her unwavering sense that she is right in pressing for the consecrated site—as testimony both to her religious conservatism and to her skepticism toward authoritarian deception.

Pamela’s certainty in her own judgment about this detail is emblematic of her lack of delusion throughout the novel; in fact, the main characters who suffer from delusion are Pamela’s male suitors, Mr. B. and Parson Williams. In graciously accepting Mr. B.’s first honorable proposal of marriage, Pamela immediately challenges him on the location of it: “I have no Will but yours, said I (all glowing like the Fire, as I could feel:) But, Sir, did you say in the House?” When he responds that it would be “very publick if we go to Church,” Pamela counters, “It is a Holy Rite, Sir, … and would be better, methinks, in a Holy Place.” Mr. B. then responds by offering to order his “own little Chapel,” which had been used only as a “Lumber-room” for two generations, to be “got ready for the Ceremony.”⁸ While B. sees this as a concession to Pamela’s visible “Confusion” and “trembling Tenderness,” which he interprets as evidence of her love for him, she understands the use of the chapel as evidence of the moral centrality of the Anglican church. This scene also emphasizes her position as a heroine who is never deluded. Even as Mr. B. is offering to make ready the chapel as a concession to her own evident “Tenderness,” she is still sharp-eyed, and keen to verify the chapel’s institutional authenticity: “I presume,” she observes, “it has been consecrated.”⁹ The chapel scene thus confirms her as the paradigm of the undeluded heroine even as it also bolsters O’Connell’s view of Richardson as engaging in “a particularly successful attempt to harness the technology of the novel to a High Church Anglican outreach project designed to disseminate practical Christianity and moral reform in resistance to Whiggish secularism.”¹⁰

Whether we label Pamela a Whig, for her spirit of resistance and her ambitious rise in social rank, or a Tory who is able to the revive the rural “orthodoxy of church life” at the estate of a squire who claims to find “the Distinctions of Whig and Tory odious,” she is not a supporter of the romantic cause of the Jacobites in 1740, although Richardson had evinced possible Jacobite sympathies in the 1720s.¹¹ Pamela is also famously unafraid of speaking truth to power and ever alert to the deceptive guises through which power manifests itself, in a novel written at the apex of Robert Walpole’s powerful hold on British politics. Her lack of delusion signals a clear political pragmatism, yoking resistance to traditionalism, as she works to fend off Mr. B’s repeated and increasingly scheming attempts on her virtue. As Toni Bowers observes, the novel examines “the meaning and legitimacy of new-tory sensibilities in a Hanoverian age.”¹² Margaret Anne Doody identifies Mr. B. as a “Country Gentleman” who names his first son Charles; he is not quite Richardson’s image of “what the true Tory Prince should look like.” For Doody, that Tory Prince is best seen in the eponymous hero of Richardson’s subsequent novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel that articulates “a dream of restoration, reconciliation, and wholeness [for] an England ba...