ABSTRACT

While “passion” can mean any overpowering feeling or emotion,2 Sterling’s poem celebrates Eliza Haywood as the Arbitress of one particular valence of passion: love, or desire. The tribute is appropriate, for Haywood is still best known for the reams of amatory fi ction that characterized her early career. Her racy bestseller, Love in Excess (1719), would earn her a place with Aphra Behn and Delariviere Manley in the “fair Triumvirate of Wit,”3 a group of writers known for their ability to incite desire-and the physiological signs of desire-in their readers. But the “passions” that these women invoke have a personal valence, too. As Haywood’s dedication to The Fatal Secret (1725) claims, women wrote about love because it was within the realm of their admittedly limited experience. They knew about it:

But as I am a Woman, and consequently depriv’d of those Advantages of Education which the other Sex enjoy, I cannot so far fl atter my Desires, as to imagine it in my Power to soar to any Subject higher than that which Nature is not negligent to teach us. Love . . . requires no Aids of Learning, no general Conversation, no Application . . . this is a Theme, therefore, which . . . frees me from the Imputation of Vain or Self-Suffi cient:—None can tax me with having too great an Opinion of my own Genius, when I aim at nothing but what the meanest may perform.4