The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood

This pioneering literary biography rescues Eliza Haywood from the obscurity where centuries of male critics consigned her. Haywood (1693-1756) was England's first professional female novelist, a woman who dared to write openly about female desire, marital tyranny, and women's struggles for autonomy in a society determined to silence her. Whicher traces a remarkable life: an unconventional upbringing, a marriage to a clergyman that ended in scandalous elopement, and the vicious gossip that followed her into literary circles. Her novels, plays, and pamphlets were wildly popular in their time yet dismissed as vulgar by male contemporaries who could not tolerate a woman commanding such literary power. Whicher argues persuasively that Haywood's bold fictional explorations of passion and female agency helped forge the novel itself as a form, even as later critics worked to erase her from the literary canon. This scholarly but passionate work remains essential reading for anyone interested in recovered voices, the hidden origins of the English novel, and the women who wrote before feminism had a name.