212. Eliza Haywood — The Female Spectator and Betsy Thoughtless with Kelly J. Plante

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast that revives forgotten female writers and celebrates their contributions to literature. I'm Kim Askew. 

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes. A quick heads up for Southern California listeners: Kim and I will be participating in an event at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on the evening of Tuesday, October 15th. We'll be in discussion with Iris Jamahl Dunkle to celebrate the launch of her new biography on the writer Sanora Babb.So if you're in the area, we'd love for you to join us. If you're not nearby, stay tuned for our upcoming podcast episode on Sanora Babb two weeks from now. Having said that, let's now turn our focus to today's lost lady, an incredibly prolific 18th century writer whose life is still, frankly, a little bit of a mystery.

KIM: Despite Eliza Haywood's extensive body of work, we hardly know anything about her. We don't even know the exact year she was born. 

AMY: What we do know is that she was a woman of many talents — novelist, playwright, actress, and later, a pioneering editor of political periodicals. 

KIM: Her early works were wildly popular, and then she broke new ground, albeit anonymously, as the editor of The Female Spectator, the first periodical written by women for women.

AMY: Her resume is also reminding me a little bit of Aphra Behn, whom we've done a previous episode on. We have a special guest to help us learn a little bit more about Eliza Haywood and her significance in the literary landscape of the 18th century. 

KIM: I am so excited for this, so let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Okay, joining us today is Dr. Kelly J. Plante, an essayist, editor, and scholar specializing in transatlantic 18th century literature. Her research focuses on the evolution of fiction and nonfiction during this period, and she's written extensively about Eliza Haywood's contributions to literature and journalism. Welcome, Kelly. So glad to have you! 

KELLY: Hi, Amy and Kim. Thank you so much for having me. This is such important work that you do on this podcast and I'm honored and delighted to be here. 

KIM: We're so glad you're here. So Kelly, what can you tell us about Haywood's beginnings and how she became this prolific writer?

KELLY: Well, we don't know exactly as you alluded… her birthday or birthplace. We don't know who her parents were or what she was like growing up. But we do know that in her early adulthood, she set out to become an actress, which was one of the few professions if you were a woman and interested in literature and ideas that you could do to fulfill yourself. And so she moved from England to Dublin and she was apparently quite a raucous act on the Dublin stage. She also was involved in the same theater circles as the famous. Henry Fielding, he wrote Tom Jones, and, like Haywood, he wrote novels and plays, and so she hung out and associated with him. She was then involved in manuscript coteries or poetry circles that are described by her biographer, Katherine King, as “psychosexual.”

KIM: Ooh, intriguing. 

AMY: I'm already getting a very saucy vibe from this lady, like hanging out with Henry Fielding… 

KIM: Yep. Actress. 

KELLY: Mm-hmm. “Saucy” is the perfect word. It's a very 18th-century word that Richardson used a lot in Pamela, and um, she wrote in his circle and against him as well. So then when the stage was kind of shut down and no longer reasonable or profitable for her to pursue, she then began writing novels, or what were called fictions. They weren't called novels yet, or they were called “the novel kind of writing.” Her first novel was Love in Excess. 

KIM: Her novels were pretty big in their day, right? 

KELLY: Yeah, the two most popular 18th century novels were Robinson Crusoe and Love in Excess, and they were released at the same time.

KIM: Wow! 

Amy: Who would have known? Oh my gosh, we all know Daniel Defoe. What the heck?! Yeah. Oh, I'm almost like, don't tell me that, Kelly. Like, I don't even want to know that because it's just so irritating. 

KELLY: Well, it gets worse and it gets more irritating once you know the history between her and Defoe and Richardson. But yeah, it may have even sold more copies than Robinson Crusoe. Although we know which one stood the test of time, not because it was better, but because of power dynamics of the historical record. Who gets to tell the stories we pass down? 

AMY: If I'm looking at these two, which one am I going to choose? A man sitting by himself on an island, basically, or this other one called Love in Excess, which has all kinds of crazy, racy, entertaining, interpersonal dynamics.

KIM: Which one would you choose if you were stranded on a desert isle? 

KELLY: Exactly. Yeah. 

AMY: So it sounds like Haywood and her racy novels were quite the sensation early on, clearly. But today's scholars seem to be even more interested in her journalism, and that includes you, Kelly. 

KELLY: Yeah, most of her works that get taught in literature classrooms, especially undergraduate just because they're shorter is, you know, Love in Excess, but even more so Fantomina, which is even shorter. And it's really a whirlwind. Um, I highly recommend reading it. It's crazy. Um, but since, um, “Haywood studies” is rounding its quarter century of age, you know, there's definitely been a critical turn to focus on her later in life periodicals, which she wrote when she was older. So The Female Spectator and The Parrot. And then Epistles for the Ladies, but more so the first two that I mentioned, they've been kind of examined as wartime periodicals. A scholar named Catherine Ingrassia has done a really great chapter in the first book ever to be dedicated or published on 18th century women periodicalists. And that was published just a few years ago. (It's crazy to me as someone interested in the history of journalism and in women writers that that's the first edition.) It's really great. But so she has an essay in there about Haywood as a wartime writer. And while The Female Spectator is talking about “domestic issues” like the marriage plots and things like that, it's done so in this juxtaposition with current events. So one of the major issues going on in England at that time was the Jacobite Revolution, and she's really challenging the energy and the air of England at that time, which was really tense for a time. Really anti-Catholic, depending on whose side you are on, and really fearful of this coming invasion that ultimately we know now ended up failing, but they didn't know that at the time. And so she's really writing for women and men, but she's telling women how to kind of survive in this crazy world. 

AMY: So rather than try to cover the entire output of The Female Spectator for this episode, you helpfully pointed us to one particular book. And it includes a letter by a quote unquote reader named “Clarabella,” but we're kind of assuming that it's Haywood. This story is then followed by a response from The Female Spectator editor. And listeners, we'll share a link to this in our show notes so that you can read it too. It kind of marries what you were saying, the sort of wartime writing with issues relating to women. Why does it have special significance to you to focus on?

KELLY: What I really love about this book is the context that it appears in, but also It is a depiction of a woman, “Clarabella,” this person who's writing in for a friend. So I'm really interested in creative nonfiction and how do fiction and nonfiction play together. She's deconstructing that. She's also deconstructing another binary, which is man and woman. She depicts a woman, Aliena, who, “equips herself in the habit of a man.” She follows her lover, who is a captain of the British Royal Navy, who got orders to deploy to the West Indies. Everybody thought he was going to propose to her and he didn't. So it's kind of embarrassing. She thought she was going to marry this man. So she dresses as a cabin boy and goes to the port town. So she says to his buddy, the lieutenant, “I want to join your regiment.” And he says, “Okay, you can join, you can come on the ship with us.” He puts her in this group of other young boys of her entry level rank. And Clarabella writes: “They start pinching each other on the ribs, as young boys often do, and they found that she had breasts.” So, there's a lot of like, queer and trans overtones. Not even just overtones, just straight up, cross-dressing, all that, going on in this narrative. 

KIM: Very Shakespearean. 

KELLY: Yes. Anyway, so her family is like, “Where did she go?” They launched this public investigation. They come and find her and they confront him thinking that they were eloping. They were not eloping. She just was going to join the military and they don't know that. So they get in this awkward confrontation with him. It doesn't end up good for Aliena. So he gets off the hook. He goes to the West Indies, he deploys. And her family really takes it out on her. She's then somewhat imprisoned in her house, and she's really ostracized in her community and punished for it. So this is why Clarabella is trying to write in as a helpful friend to say, “Hey, Female Spectator, please redress this situation for her.” What we get is a really interesting nuanced judgment from the female spectator on what should happen next. 

Amy: As you mentioned, it's a blurry line between fact and fiction because it's purported to be a true story, right? She's like, “I swear to God, this is my friend, and this is gonna sound crazy, but this shit really happened, and I'm gonna tell you.” And of course it's fake. I mean, it's so over the top. It's like that song, [sings] “The things you do for love!” And you think based on similar stories, like Shakespeare's plays, it would all end up good. And this goes horribly awry. It's awful! 

KELLY: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I love that you point out it's so clearly fiction, but for 18th-century readers, it might not have been so clearly fiction as we think now, because a little bit before this is written, so many women were joining the army that the king had to issue a decree that women were not allowed to wear military clothing.

AMY: This is context I needed. I have no idea about this! Okay. 

KELLY: And so the most famous historical figure is Christian Davies, or Mother Ross, and she is a real life “female soldier” who dressed in military garb and joined the military. And she was successful for several years. There were real life examples in the news and in Broadside Ballads at the time, which, this is another reason this book piqued my interest so much because I was working on a project at Wayne State University about warrior women. And the story is an old tale from, you know, Joan of Arc or Mulan, and it's a really ancient trope, but it was very popular in the 18th century. So there's a lot going on that Haywood's playing with culturally. That's why periodicals are so cool to study because they're blending fact and fiction, and she's really got her finger on the pulse of her culture.

AMY: The reaction to Clarabella's letter, so the editorial response, was not at all what I was expecting. Because I'm reading Clarabella's telling of it, and I'm like, “I can't believe this happened to her; she didn't deserve this.” And then suddenly we get the response, and I'm like, “huh?” 

KELLY: Right. It's so weird reading it from our time, looking back at her time, because like, again, we have to think about the context she's writing it in. And while I just told you like, oh, it really could have happened, you know, there were these real life women who dressed as men and joined the military, It also could be read symbolically because as we talked about before. Because she had a romanticization of the lost cause of Jacobitism or, um, “Bonnie Prince Charlie” who was Charles Edward Stewart, who was known as a pretender to the throne. You could also read Aliena as a symbolic characterization of him, because of when this is taking place in 1745, which is when he dressed as Bonnie [Betty] Burke to invade England. 

KIM: It's all coming together. Yes. 

KELLY: Yeah, it's really complicated. It's really hard when you find an artifact like this, trying to figure out, well, what was she intending as the author to portray and how would people have taken it? So, it could have been taken as she's writing about a political situation, about the Jacobite cause. 

KIM: It totally makes sense when you're saying that. It's like you can't just look at it as a piece on its own. There's so much you need to understand about what's going on at the time, and then there can be more than one reading based on that even.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah, I just took it on the very surface level. The editorial response being, “Ladies, that was stupid. Don't do that.” 

KELLY: Right. 

AMY: “You're going to ruin your life if you go run off and try to join the Navy.” 

KELLY: That's certainly a legitimate way to read it. And maybe it's how she got away with political commentary, you know?

AMY: Interesting. 

KELLY: They could have been like, “Oh, this is seditious libel. This is treason. You're advocating for the Stuarts.” And she could say, “No, it's a true story. It's, you know, this woman really tried doing this.” 

KIM: Ooh, I love this. Do you want to actually read from her rebuttal so we can hear?

KELLY: Sure, and I love her tone in her rebuttal. She starts off very thankful to the correspondent. She is an editor in chief, so she starts, “Of all the letters with which The Female Spectator has been favored, none gave us a greater mixture of pain and pleasure than this. It is difficult to say whether the unhappy story it contains, or the agreeable manner in which it is related, most engages our attention. But while we do justice to the historian and pity the unfortunate lady in whose cause she has employed her pen, we must be wary how we excuse her faults so far as to hinder others from being upon their guard, not to fall into the same.” So at first we think, okay, she's going to take a conservative view. “Ladies don't do what Aliena has done.” So then she says, “Neither is it possible to comply with the request of this agreeable correspondent in passing too severe a judgment on the captain's behavior.” So it seems like she's going to let him off the hook, but further down, she says, “Instances of young people who, after the first wound given to their reputation, have thought themselves under no manner of restraint and abandoned to all sense of shame are so flagrant that I wonder any parent or relation should not tremble at publishing a fault which, If concealed, might possibly be the last, but if divulged is for the most part but the beginning or prelude to a continued series of vice.”

I really love what she's doing here because she's really taking us on a logical trip of: Here's what you think I'm going to say, and this is what I'm going to say. And it's not a problem that Aliena did this. It's a problem that her parents publicized it. 

KIM: Interesting. 

KELLY: Basically, young people are going to do stupid shit, and parents should just expect that. 

AMY: And Clarabella, by extension, like, “Why'd you need to write in?” Do we know that “Clarabella,” was actually Haywood just writing this story? We don't know, do we? 

KELLY: Yeah, she could be replying to herself. We don't have anything to go off of to see what was truly written in. We don't have her letters. We don't have her diaries. We just don't know. And readers at the time didn't necessarily all know that it was Haywood. Like The Female Spectator was a persona. 

KIM: Okay, so it was an entity or collective in their minds, maybe, as opposed to her specifically. Right. So let's shift gears for a minute. Haywood, she wasn't just a periodical editor. You know, we talked about how she wrote novels. She also wrote plays. She was an actress. Do you want to talk a little bit about how these different aspects of her career might have influenced her writing overall? 

KELLY: Yeah, I think that her experience as an actress definitely infuses life and vivacity into her writing. And she's able to convey power dynamics between men and women in such a theatrical way. Her attempt at character development really shines through in her last novel, Betsy Thoughtless, where she critiques John Locke's (the philosopher's) idea of the tabula rasa, or the blank slate, with the idea of a thoughtless female protagonist. It reminds me of The Sound of Music, where, what is Rolf saying about like the I'm totally off the cuff here, but a woman is “a page to write on” or something and… well, I am not going to start singing now, but I just thought that…

AMY: “You are 16 going on 17.” It’s like: “Your mind little girl is an empty page that men will want to write on.” (To write on!!)

KIM: Yeah. And we watched this all through our childhood. Nice. 

AMY: Okay. So Betsy Thoughtless is basically Liesel from The Sound of Music. 

KELLY: Oh my God. Yes. Liesel of 1751. So Betsy Thoughtless, the blank slate, she starts off as a coquette at the beginning of her life, you know, as she's depicted in her 20s. And she meets a man named Trueworth at Oxford or Cambridge when she's visiting her brother. And he's the perfect guy. His name says it all: Trueworth. She doesn't stay with him. She ends up marrying a man named Mr. Munden. Even his name just sounds bland. So this book is so interesting because It shows her growth because unlike Aliena, she doesn't have parents that publicize all her faults. And so she's allowed to make these mistakes, and she doesn't maintain her innocence, but she's this complex woman that… she is able to have happiness after making mistakes. And her major mistake is marrying this man. So this is just a snapshot of their domestic life that she is able to escape:

[reads a passage from Betsy Thoughtless]

Amy: Theatrical! 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: I knew where that was going. And I was like, “No! Not the squirrel! Don't hurt the squirrel! Oh my God.” 

KELLY: She's constantly depicting power dynamics between men and women. And she's constantly showing women who go against sexual social norms and who are rebelling against it. And she's showing how to be subversive and also how to survive in this really competitive marriage market that we've seen later in Jane Austen novels of women's survival really depending on marriage and what does that do for the core female self?

AMY: That's what I kind of took away from the “Aliena” tale. She was saying, “Girls don't do this. If you want things to work out for you, don't do this.”

KIM: Yeah, it's a pragmatic approach. Yeah, yeah, yep. 

KELLY: Or if you're gonna do it, do it right and have that be who you truly are, like Christian Davies. You know, be tough and be able to withstand all of what's going to happen.

AMY: Yeah, if you make that choice then the boys are going to grab your boobs on the boat and you better be prepared for it, sort of thing. There was so much attempted rape in that story, too! 

KELLY: Yeah, and you guys touched on that in your episode on Aphra Behn as well. The culture at the time, you know rape and consent were different. I'm not saying she's condoning it, but she is showing you how to stay safe.

KIM: Yeah, and she's working within the framework of society. 

AMY: Did Eliza Haywood ever face any backlash or controversy surrounding her writings, or was she always able to kind of couch it in a way that it was accepted? 

KELLY: Well, she was under arrest in 1750 because it was suspected that she produced a seditious pamphlet. And she said she “never wrote anything in a political way.” That was a lie, as we've seen. She did write about politics. She was never jailed or anything like that, but there was definitely a risk. So she was able to really successfully tread those waters as a female writer and as a political writer at a time where everything you wrote was under suspect. She definitely had controversy and we talked about Defoe earlier. Defoe and Samuel Richardson, those two men, as far as I'm concerned, they appropriated her amateur fiction methods in Pamela and Roxanna. And while they publicly wrote against writers like Haywood, they really benefited off of her method. There's also the famous case of Jonathan Swift calling her a “stupid, infamous, scribbling woman.” And Alexander Pope who mocked her in his [Dunciad] poem, a satire against Grub Street. I don't even want to repeat the misogynistic tropes that he used, but he talked about her breasts and her two “illegitimate” children. So she definitely had some misogyny that was attacking her at the time. 

AMY: You're giving the examples of all these other male writers that said insulting things about her. It's taking me back to Aliena's story. She did put herself on the boat in a way. She was in this field that is with all the men.

KIM: That's a good point, Amy. 

AMY: She's a lone female figure, relatively speaking, in that world. In that sense, if you compare what she was doing with the parable that she wrote for us, you can see what she was trying to get at. Like, if you're going to get on the boat, it's not for the faint of heart, and it's not for the delicate.

KELLY: Mm-hmm. Exactly. She was doing that in The Female Spectator. She was positing herself as a model for how to be a woman writer and how to withstand society at the time. 

KIM: Um, we talked about Aphra Behn, you know, the other writers of her time, or Frances Burney, for example. Why now does she not have as much recognition as some of those names?

KELLY: Haywood is definitely more often compared to Aphra Behn because their life and career spans seem to be closer to overlapping, but it's really interesting and appropriate that you picked these three. Because their lifespans take us from the beginning to the end of really the long 18th century from kind of the raunchy Restoration of Charles II to the throne and his crazy court life with prostitution and debauchery and ultimately into Jane Austen, who is necessarily influenced by all three, whether she wanted to be or not. And the publishing culture was really built on their legacy — for men as well as women. And so Behn, she lives about 1640 to 1689, and she writes until her death at about age 49. And Haywood was probably born four years after she died in 1693 to 1756. And she also wrote until she died when she was about 63 years old. And Burney, we know so much more about biographically. And her birth date, she was about four years after Haywood died. Burney played with a lot of different genres too, but she's mostly known for the novel, which was a more, by that time, respectable form. You can't have Jane Austen or Frances Burney without having Haywood before them.

KIM: So, we talked about Love in Excess a little bit and Fantomina. Do you think one of her novels is her greatest novel and why? What should we go out and read? 

KELLY: Well, my answer to what you should go out and read first, probably not her greatest in my opinion, but Fantomina is very easy to finish and very, very mind blowing. So that's a really great first read. But in terms of her greatest novel, really, Betsy Thoughtless, it's a really great novel if you can get through it. Broadview Press makes a really great annotated edition of it. 

KIM: We love Broadview. 

KELLY: Yeah, they have a great Introduction. 

AMY: You're holding it up right now to the screen and I'm like, “Wow, that's a fat book.” I'm still not through my Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

KIM: Amy's been on a journey. 

AMY: That was my pandemic novel and I never finished it because it's so fat. 

KIM: It's almost like you can never finish it now.

AMY: I will miraculously explode or disappear or something once I get to the last page, so I just can't finish it. Yeah.

KIM: It just can't happen. 

KELLY: I read Clarissa for my pandemic novel. 

AMY: Oh, are you kidding? And you, you finished it? You finished it. The thing is, I really love it. It just got so repetitive. Like, it's so much of the same over and over. 

KELLY: You know how I got through it? Number one, it was on my qualifying exams for my PhD, so I had to. But actually, my advisor was like, “Don't put Clarissa on your qualifying exam list. It's too long.” And I was like, “I really want to read it.” But there was this group on Twitter, #Clarissa2020, that everybody started 2020 thinking we would read it in real time and we would read the letters on the dates that they were dated. And I had to use audio books to read some of it because it's…

KIM: Oh, that's a good idea. 

KELLY: Yeah, I split it up. But I also happened to be like, I had a son and whenever I was feeding him, like he was a baby, so I'd feed him and just read Clarissa on my Kindle. But I'm teaching it right now. 

AMY: You're not making them read at all, are you?

KELLY: No, no. That's how, yeah, I was looking for Betsy Thoughtless and that's when I thought, I thought, “Oh, it's not as long as Clarissa,” because Clarissa is like three times as big as them. But that's how I found it on my bookshelf because I said, look for the obnoxiously large book. So it's pretty big.

KIM: Lost Ladies of Lit Challenge, listeners. We're gonna read Betsy Thoughtless together. I like that. 

AMY: It's much thinner than Clarissa. We can do it. Yeah, definitely. 

KELLY: Yeah, and it's published about the same time as Clarissa, and I think that they're playing with similar ideas, but it's not epistolary like Clarissa; it has an omniscient narrator, so it's a little bit more accessible in that way. Um, but why I love it so much is you know what I said earlier that it's a female protagonist that is allowed to make mistakes and she's the opposite of Clarissa. Clarissa is perfect, and that's why you can sympathize with her because she's perfect yet all this horrible stuff happens to her and you can't victim blame Clarissa because she's an angel, right? He writes that she's “not of this world.” Betsy Thoughtless is very much of this world, and the reason it's so long, I think, is women would read this and they could really immerse themselves in her world and think, If I had a friend like this, what would I do? If a guy did this to me, what could I do? But what's really valuable, too, about Betsy Thoughtless and that passage that I chose, I think that she was making a point about if you see a man that is mistreating a squirrel (he killed the squirrel, right?) — if he's able to do that, and I think Haywood called it a trifle, like it seems like a trifle because it's just a squirrel, but if somebody's doing that, then what are they doing to the woman that is in their house? So she's really showing the violence that happens outside to the interior self. And I think that it's fascinating to think of Betsy Thoughtless as this way to really grow and become in this really violent world and be able to come out successfully. 

AMY: All right, so clearly we have a lot to choose from with Eliza Haywood. If you guys want to start small, listeners, we're going to link in our show notes to, um, what we read from The Female Spectator, or you could go check out some of these novels. I know I want to now. 

KIM: Yep, me too!

AMY: Kelly, thank you so much for sharing all your insights with us today. Clearly, Eliza Haywood deserves to be more widely recognized, and this was so fun.

KELLY: Thank you again so much for having me and for the work that you do on Lost Ladies of Lit. I really appreciate being here. Thank you so much. 

AMY: And thanks to all of you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you enjoyed this episode. We'll be back next time with another forgotten female writer who deserves a place in the literary canon.

KIM: We also invite you to join our free Substack newsletter and subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive bonus episodes which drop twice a month. 

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.