“An Undisputed Right to this Offering”
A Critical Edition of Eliza Haywood’s Dedicatory Epistle of The Female Spectator to Juliana Colyear, Duchess of Leeds
Introduction
Like the characters masquerading in her early amatory fiction, Eliza Haywood’s biography is masked in obscurity. Here are some facts that scholars agree on. Haywood was born the daughter of a London shopkeeper “probably” in 1690, married in about 1710 and “probably” left him between 1715-1720. She associated early in her career with Whigs such as Richard Steele (who with Joseph Addison co-founded The Spectator, from which Haywood’s Female Spectator derives its name) and Daniel Defoe, and was publicly criticized by Alexander Pope as a “stupid, infamous, scribbling woman” in 1731. She produced little during the 1730s and reappeared on the literary scene in 1744 as the author of The Female Spectator.
Haywood literary criticism saw a boom in the late 20th century after feminists unearthed her.1 Only since about 2010, though, has her Female Spectator garnered the serious attention of scholars, despite its historically significant status as the first periodical by and for women and despite the fact that it was Haywood’s most popular work during her lifetime. Previously, scholars understood The Female Spectator as Haywood’s “testament to her shift away from the audacity that distinguished her earlier writings, toward a more sober didacticism allegedly characteristic of her later years as a writer” (Girten, p. 56). Kristin Girten counters that understanding, participating in the newer critical framework of viewing The Female Spectator as subtly subversive. Along with Kathryn King’s highly lauded Political Biography of Eliza Haywood and Lynn Wright and Donald Newman’s Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator, I advance the persona of Haywood, even “late” Haywood, as a political and philosophical writer, wisely navigating the circumstances afforded her as one of the most prolific (in terms of genre), 18th-century women writers. In 1786, the first female philosopher was recognized by the British Royal Society: Caroline Herschel, whose discovery Frances Burney termed “the first lady’s comet” (Girten, p. 60). Haywood and her periodical’s “correspondents” were dubbed the “fair philosophers” 42 years before that, in The Gentleman’s Magazine (Fair Philosopher 15).2 While “other texts by women from the same period are even more overt in their challenge to gender disparity” (Girten, p. 70)—including those by Haywood’s younger self—The Female Spectator persuades in a different, perhaps more politically savvy and subtle, way.
For a woman to earn a living as a professional writer in a time period when doing so was often equated to prostitution required constant diplomacy. Cheryl Turner has examined how women writers benefited from sustained relationships with publishers, and scholars have focused on Haywood’s relationship with her frequent publisher late in her career, Thomas Gardner, but there exists no sustained study of Haywood’s relationship with her patrons, such as Juliana Colyear, Duchess of Leeds, to whom she dedicates the Female Spectator project at its onset. Sarah Prescott writes that “Eliza Haywood’s participation in and use of patronage has often been overlooked in favour of recent assessments of her as working almost exclusively in the world of the booksellers and printers” (p. 116), and King writes that “further research on Haywood’s dedicatory practices over the long trajectory of her writing life is needed before we can draw conclusions about the relationship between Haywood’s strategies as an author and the forms of patronage available to her” (Fair Philosopher, p. 117). Though research is lacking, close-reading Haywood’s dedications of her work to potential patrons offers examples of the art of persuasion through subtle flattery.
Haywood’s dedication of The Female Spectator to Colyear has been described as a continuation of Haywood’s “Hanoverian and pro-Marlborough sentiments”3 and resultant “fascination” with Sarah Churchill and her family (Selected Fiction xviii).4 Was Haywood successful in receiving payment from Colyear and her cousins, to whom other Female Spectator volumes are dedicated? If so, how much money did she receive? What was the extent of Haywood’s relationship with these women, if any other than the solicitation of funds for her writing? What was her rationale for targeting “patriotic” and unpatriotic patrons alike—even within the 24-month period of circulation of the same periodical?5 What was the effect on readers, that the periodical boasted Colyear’s name in the introductory pages? Is Haywood referring to Colyear’s second husband in the dedication, ignoring her first husband, Peregrine Osborne, the Duke of Leeds (rumored to be “something of a rake,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)? Due to the lack of sustained study on Haywood’s use of and success with patronage, these questions, like much of Haywood’s biography, are for now masked in obscurity.
In the dedicatory epistle to volume 1, Haywood writes that “because the chief view in publishing these monthly essays is to rectify some [societal] errors,” she wishes them to be placed “under the protection of” Colyear, who is “not only of an unblemished conduct, but also of an exalted virtue, whose example may enforce the precepts they contain, and is herself a shining pattern for others to copy after.” After paying due deference to her virtue and ancestral line, Haywood shifts strategies: She praises Colyear “for those innate graces, which no ancestry can give.” While Haywood engages with the necessary, laudatory rhetoric for obtaining patronage in the 18th-century, this shift indicates potentially pro-middle class sentiments. Haywood diplomatically appeals to upper-class and middle-class readerships simultaneously, by praising Colyear’s ancestry and her virtue—“which no ancestry can give, no titles can embellish, nor no beauty atone for the want of.” In The Female Spectator’s dedication, Haywood performs with political and philosophical skill, honed in her unique positionality as a prolific writer in the male-dominated publishing world, through years of hard work “which no ancestry could give” her.
NOTES
1. For an example, see Helen Koon’s seminal article, “Eliza Haywood and the Female Spectator.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1, 1978, pp. 43-55.
2. Scholars do not know whether Haywood wrote as the four correspondents herself, or if she did in fact edit other women’s writing as she purports to have done.
3. The adjective “Hanoverian” describes supporters of the British House of Hanover, the dynasty that ruled the United Kingdom 1714-1901. Haywood refers to Colyear’s descendents Marlborough and Godolphin as “dear patriot-names” in the Female Spectator dedication.
4. Colyear was Sarah Churchill’s granddaughter; Churchill’s other granddaughters were the dedicatees of volumes two and four of The Female Spectator.
5. For more on this political situation that Haywood was treading, see Fair Philosopher, p. 117.