ABSTRACT
While recent work on early eighteenth-century print culture has witnessed a burgeoning interest in the important role played there by women authors, we still have no sustained comparative analysis of the relationship between the period’s most infl uential periodical-Addison and Steele’s Spectator papers (1711-14)—and Eliza Haywood’s permutations of the genre in the Female Spectator (1744-46), and the Invisible Spy (1755).1 Most studies of Haywood focus on her numerous popular novels of the 1720s, rather than on her periodicals;2 even the few essays treating her journalism often merely gesture toward the superfi cial resemblances between Haywood’s most widely read periodical and its predecessor.3 But Haywood’s engagement with Addison and Steele goes far beyond the structural similarities of the fi ctional spectatorial club, the inclusion of letters ostensibly written by readers, and the many socioethical concerns shared by the two periodicals. Haywood’s gendered reversal of Addison and Steele’s title and eidolon implies the antecedent journal was itself gendered under the guise of its supposed neutrality, and her appropriative re-deployment of their motifs serves as more than a mere marketing ploy.
