ABSTRACT
Visiting Smollett’s Sunday supper for his “unfortunate brothers of the quill,” Jery Melford in Humphry Clinker learns that novel writing “is now engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and in all the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only inchanted by their genius, but reformed by their morality.”1 In reality, novels, whether by men or women, were written in response to the flourishing marketplace for printed matter. The quantity of fiction written by women peaked around 1740 and maintained its dominance until the mid-1780s.2 Smollett summarizes qualities that were associated (if only in booksellers’ blurbs) with the female novel in the mid-century-“delicacy and knowledge of the human heart.” This understanding of female narrative’s distinctive qualities emerged as fiction acquired a measure of moral respectability, partly through the pious example in the 1720s and early 1730s of Jane Barker, Penelope Aubin, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe.3 Eliza Haywood’s career traces the shifting image of the woman novelist. The imitator of Delarivière Manley’s scandal chronicles in works such as Memoirs of a Certain Island (1725) and The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1727) and the producer of amatory novellas through the 1720s, Haywood turned with the market in the 1740s and early 1750s in The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), Life’s Progress Through the Passions: Or, The Adventures of Natura (1747), The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753) to much longer, more thoughtful and moralistic narratives. Haywood’s career serves for Jane Spencer as “a paradigm for that of the eighteenth-century woman novelist generally: at first praised as amorous, then castigated as immoral, and finally accepted on new, and limiting, terms.”4 Spencer sees Haywood’s transformation from purveyor of lubricious scandal and
erotic fantasy to moral and historical novelist as acquiescence to new and “limiting” standards for female behavior summed up in “nature, morality, [and] modesty.” These same qualities of spontaneity, simplicity, and modesty came to be valued, as the century progressed, not just in women but in all writers, so that “the properly ‘feminine’ and the properly ‘literary’ were both being re-defined along the same lines.”5
