Selections from The Female Spectator

by Eliza Fowler Haywood, Patricia Meyer Spacks (Editor)

After Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood was the most important English female novelist of the early eighteenth century. She also edited several serial newspapers, the most important of which, the Female Spectator , was the first modern periodical written by a woman and addressed to a female audience. This fully annotated collection of articles selected from the Female Spectator includes romantic and satiric fiction, moral essays, and social commentary, covering the broad range of concerns shared by eighteenth-century middle-class women. Perhaps most compelling to a twentieth-century audience is the evidence of what we might be tempted to call feminist awareness.

By no means revolutionary in her attitudes, Haywood nonetheless perceives the inequities of her periods social conditions for women. She offers pragmatic advice, such as how to avoid disastrous marriages, how to deal with wandering husbands, and what kind of education women should seek. The essays also report on a broad range of social actualities, from the craze for tea drinking and the dangers of gossip to the problem of compulsive gambling. They allude to such larger matters as politics, war, and diplomacy, and promote the importance of science and the urgency of developing informed relations with nature.

Genres: Classics

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Eliza Haywood (1693 – 1756), born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood’s literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest. Described as “prolific even by the standards of a prolific age” (Blouch, intro 7), Haywood wrote and published over seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood is a significant figure of the 18th century as one of the important founders of the novel in English. Today she is studied primarily as a novelist.

Reviews

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this selection, I'm so glad to have been exposed.

[Jennevieve Culver · Rating 3 out of 5]

she loves to yap doesn't she

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting collection of essays from one of the earliest newspapers written by a woman for a female audience. This is essential reading for anyone interested in women's writing from this time period. Certainly many of Haywood's essays still ring true for the modern reader, particularly those on the themes of women's education and the stunting of women's capacities by lack of opportunity. While others are much more conservative, taken together, they still paint a clear picture of women's lives in 18th century England that is well worth reading about. Haywood has been largely forgotten as a novelist but she was a trailblazer in both fiction and nonfiction and her work is worth rediscovering.

[Sherwood Smith]

Excellent for anyone fascinated with women's viewpoints in the 1700s.