Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless: Feminism and the Novel

Introduction: Haywood and the Rise of the Novel

The fascinating intrigues that surround the fictionalized search for love — both legitimate and otherwise — have long been the subject of titillating drama. Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless is nothing less than a chronicle of the wanderings of a young fictional character trying to assert a culturally limited degree of control over the decisions surrounding her love life and that of her friends. The reasons for the creation of this work are no doubt countless, yet the historical interpretation of it has traditionally cast it as a work created solely for the purpose of earning a living. Even in the early eighteenth century, "sex sells." More recent scholarship, however, has focused on the idea that Haywood and her literary contemporaries were not merely selling books but giving life to an entirely new genre — the modern novel — and, in doing so, were also attempting to advance feminist reform.

Contemporary male authors who wrote similar works for profit may have received greater acknowledgment and greater monetary reward, yet a hindsight reflection on Haywood's works demonstrates not only her literary skill but also the fact that she was able to eke out a living in a changing, commercializing literary climate — proof of her validity as a compelling artist.

Interest in Haywood has revived in recent decades as part of a wider concern with the so-called "mothers of the novel." Pope's satirical method of collapsing personal judgments into aesthetic ones is considered to have caused an enduring neglect of both the writer and of the genre — romantic fiction — in which she wrote (Hammond 196). Modern scholarship clearly elevates The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless as Haywood's most successful and most influential work, because she so ambitiously engaged the new genre of the novel to elicit reform — particularly regarding the standards of women's education and the position of women in marriage and family life. Though the novel eventually adopts the form of the didactic tradition in its conclusion, the work itself is far more complex and revealing of the thoughts and needs of women during Haywood's time.

Eliza Haywood (née Fowler) (1693?–1756) was an English author who separated from her husband and subsequently supported herself and her two children by writing plays and novels. Two of her books, Utopia (1725) and The Court of Carmania (1727), scandalized prominent society figures and earned her the disapproval of Alexander Pope, who satirized her in The Dunciad. She also edited the periodical The Female Spectator (1744–46) (Columbia Encyclopedia 2000, 21069).

Haywood's Life and Literary Context

Although a significant body of new evidence has emerged regarding Haywood's personal life — including the question of whether she was a widow and whether her two children were illegitimate, a charge made by Pope in The Dunciad — access to her full biographical record has only recently come to light. As Christine Blouch has noted:

"Simple mathematics indicates that Alexander Pope was probably accurate in his best-known slander of Haywood. It was Pope who, in The Dunciad, gave Haywood what Whicher called 'lasting infamy' (p. 122), in part by identifying her two children as illegitimate. The two children assigned to Haywood by tradition have been confirmed in her own papers, and Pope had the number right. Moreover, if Haywood's eldest child was seven in 1729 or 1730, as she wrote, it is unlikely that the children were born in wedlock. Haywood was no longer living with her husband by 1719." (Blouch 1991, 539)

The literary abilities of Haywood are further attested to in a description of her use of different styles of descriptive language — both to arm her heroine and to honor her chastity — offered by Barbara Benedict in a 1998 issue of Studies in the Novel. Benedict argues that Haywood's narrator employs language that portrays the heroine as simultaneously seeking competition through violent adjectival usage and expressing remorse for the damage that competition has inflicted, as proof of her virtue. As Benedict writes, "The novelistic treatments of female inquiry as liberation and disaster provide a heritage for women writers of the late eighteenth century who sought to endow their heroines with the Romantic virtues of both rebellious inquiry and sentimental purity" (Benedict 1998).

A historical point of contention for the "morally upright" individuals of Haywood's time was not only that her work was considered morally unkempt, but that it was seen as a reflection of the wantonness that a female author must possess in order to conjure such literary images. The works of Eliza Haywood would have been regarded as what is now called "pulp fiction" — cheaply produced and of questionable literary value. Alexander Pope, a contemporary of Haywood and a moralistic literary critic, successfully disparaged her genre and personally attacked her in his poem The Dunciad.

Pope's Attack and Its Consequences

As Brean Hammond has documented, in the case of Eliza Haywood, Pope is credited with spectacular success in suppressing a writer's career:

"The lines that he wrote about her in book 2 of the 1729 version, figuring her as the worthy object of competition in a pissing contest between the popular publishers Curll and Chetwood, are still said by critics and literary historians to have been responsible for forcing Haywood to abandon writing." (Hammond 195–196)

The relevant lines from The Dunciad read:

See in the circle next, Eliza plac'd;
Two babes of love close clinging to her waste;
Fair as before her works she stands confess'd,
In flow'rs and pearls by bounteous Kirkall dress'd.
The Goddess then: 'Who best can send on high
The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky;
His be yon Juno of majestic size,
With cow-like-udders, and with ox-like eyes.
This China-Jordan, let the chief o'ercome
Replenish, not ingloriously, at home.' (II. 149–58)

The Reformed Heroine and Female Education

Through this satirical verse, Alexander Pope accused Haywood of a thoroughly unladylike capability. The controversy surrounding the new genre of the novel — and especially as women wrote it — may have been partly fear-driven, rooted in attempts by women writers to use a legitimate, or at least popular, format to voice concerns about the dangers that an ideal of virtue as ignorance could place women in, while also casting the man in the role of opportunistic villain.

Betsy Thoughtless is Haywood's most important novel in terms of its influence on women's literary history. As Deborah Nestor has argued, it is the first major English novel to focus on the plot of female education — or the "reformed heroine plot," which Jane Spencer identifies as the "central female tradition in the eighteenth-century novel." The roots of this tradition lay, of course, in woman's role as educator, teaching having become during the eighteenth century one of the few respectable professions open to women. The woman novelist similarly gained respectability when her texts served — or at least masqueraded — as tools of moral didacticism.

As Nestor explains: "In Betsy Thoughtless, Haywood calls attention to the novel's potential benefits as instructive literature by dramatizing the process by which popular literature acts as the agent of reform" (Nestor 1994, 529). In this way, Haywood positions the novel itself as a vehicle for social change, using the entertaining surface of romantic fiction to deliver a pointed critique of the conditions in which women were educated — or, more precisely, kept ignorant.

Conclusion: Haywood's Feminist Legacy

On several occasions in the novel, accident or male stratagem separates Betsy from family, friends, or servants, placing her in very real danger of assault. As the novel's heroine, she is always rescued; in order to remain within the conventions of comedy, the novel must reward its virtuous heroine with a happy ending — one that, in a conventionally moral novel, cannot involve a fallen woman. Although Betsy escapes the attempts made upon her physical chastity, her friend Miss Forward does not, and that subplot makes the dangers threatening the heroine seem all the more real (Nestor 532–533).

This narrative strategy — placing the heroine in danger while preserving her virtue through timely rescue — allowed Haywood to illuminate the risks imposed on women by a culture that equated ignorance with purity. The novel's structure thus becomes a critique of the social conditions it depicts, using the conventions of romantic comedy to expose the very real consequences of keeping women uninformed about the world around them.

Sadly, facing such public humiliation, Haywood tempered her literary flair to a degree that rendered her later work almost unrecognizable. Yet recent scholarship makes a compelling case that this taming should not be allowed to obscure the significance of what she had already accomplished. Betsy Thoughtless stands as a pioneering work in the tradition of the English novel — one that used the pleasures of romantic fiction to make a serious argument about women's education, autonomy, and vulnerability. Haywood's ability to survive and produce within a hostile literary marketplace, while advancing ideas that would take generations to gain full acceptance, marks her as a foundational figure in both literary and feminist history.