Critical Introduction

By Kelly Plante

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 (perhaps) in about 1710 and (probably) left him between 1715-1720. ¹ 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. ² 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 British Royal Society recognized a female philosopher for the very first time: 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). ³ 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. 

Thomas Gardner issued The Female Spectator monthly for two years, from April 1744 to May 1746, then less than two years later released a 4-volume reprint of the 24 “books,” at about 15,000 words per volume, showcasing its popularity and status. Dividing the periodical into so-called “books” and “volumes,” coupled with the hefty word count, likely served to increase the prestige and perceived value of the publication. Each book contains an essay on a single topic, with illustrative anecdotes sent in by “correspondents,” which Haywood might have written herself. Detailed, championing moral behavior and ways of thinking, and adorned with editorial and philosophical flair, these books have been compared to miniature novels, despite their issuance as journalism. ⁴ This is a critical edition of the 14th of those 25 miniature, novel-like books, containing also the dedicatory epistle of The Female Spectator for additional context. 

For a woman to earn a living as a professional writer in the 18th century as Haywood did—when doing so was often equated to prostitution—required constant vigilance and diplomacy. ⁵ Cheryl Turner has examined how women writers benefited from sustained relationships with publishers, and scholars have focused on Haywood’s relationship with Gardner, her frequent publisher late in her career, but there exists no sustained study of Haywood’s relationship with her patrons such as Juliana Colyear, the Duchess of Leeds. 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). Haywood’s Female Spectator dedication to Colyear offers examples of the art of persuasion through subtle flattery. 

Consistent with the cultural preoccupation, especially in literature by and for women, with the marriage market, Haywood dedicated The Female Spectator to Colyear, citing her discretion in her marriage(s) as the reason she wished to place The Female Spectator under Colyear’s “protection.” To provide context for the remarkable, barely-studied book 14, in this not-studied-enough periodical, this edition contains the first dedicatory epistle of The Female Spectator project as a whole, which Haywood wrote at its outset and which appears at the beginning of the first edition of the first volume. By presenting the dedicatory epistle in conjunction with book 14, this edition encourages readers to think about the story of a woman called “Aliena” and Haywood’s editorializing of it as a cautionary tale in book 14, within the complex and interconnected contexts of 18th-century literature and culture, the politics surrounding women’s writing such as Haywood’s, and The Female Spectator in terms of its objective as an integrated whole, to shed light on current and past events in an entertaining and informative fashion in order to influence women’s conduct and ways of thinking. 

The dedication of The Female Spectator to Colyear has been described as a continuation of Haywood’s “Hanoverian and pro-Marlborough sentiments” ⁶ and resultant “fascination” with Sarah Churchill and her family ⁷ (Selected Fiction xviii). 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? ⁸ 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 dedication, she 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.” This portrays The Female Spectator’s intended audience as other women, who might learn from the duchess’s example. After paying due deference to Colyear’s virtue and her 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- 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 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. 

Book 14, occurring in the third of four volumes of the Female Spectator, contains a letter by, and editorial commentary about, a correspondent referred to as Claribella regarding her acquaintance, referred to as Aliena, who disguises herself as a sailor to follow her sometime suitor, a captain in the British Royal Navy, on his mission (she never makes it beyond Gravesend, a port city off the Thames). The book unites themes common to Haywood’s ouvre, early and late—including disguise and jilted love—with themes common to the 18th century, including the military and expanding middle class, and the marriage market. This was not the first time that Haywood, in The Female Spectator or elsewhere, discusses the military, or disguise, or the dangers of “masquerading” or concealing one’s identity, for women on the marriage market. One of her earliest works, Fantomina, features a heroine who disguises herself multiple times, including as a widow and as a writer, in order to seduce and maintain the interest of her lover who, similar to Aliena’s, loses interest in her. The Female Spectator, an example of the formerly known as didactic late Haywood, offers a more explicit opinion on masquerading in its very first book, in which a young woman from the country referred to as Erminia debuts at a London masquerade, mistakes a rake for her brother, and is taken to his manor, raped, “ruined,” and consequently partakes in a self-imposed, marriageless exile back in the country. ⁹ In another Female Spectator book on the conduct of military gentlemen—book 2—a “brave young officer” (referred to as Amaranthus), like the captain with whom Aliena falls in love and follows, becomes obsessed with “glory” and no longer cares about “love” or the woman (referred to as Aminta) whom he courted previous to his military success. ¹⁰ As Haywood and/or the correspondent puts it, “love and glory are things incompatible,” a point to which “many modern great examples, as well as to numbers in antiquity” attest. ¹¹ Indeed, Haywood’s letter from Claribella concerning the misfortunes of Aliena, in addition to the essays on the dangers of masquerading and of the conduct of military gentlemen also shows that “love and glory are things incompatible” for young women on the marriage market, participating also in a narrative tradition of “many modern great examples” and examples in “antiquity,” of the historic and romantic trope of the woman warrior. 

Haywood praises Colyear for her discretion and judgment in her marriage(s), presenting her as a “pattern” for female readers to follow. In subsequent books, Haywood presents other women, their families, and suitors, of various social ranks (below that of the duchess from whom she was seeking patronage but also below and above herself as a working writer), as “shining patterns for others” not to follow. Haywood uses Claribella’s letter about Aliena in book 14 as an advisory tale for young women on how not to behave when being courted, and for families of young, “passionate” women like Aliena on how not to conduct inquiries if a female family member embarks on a similarly ill-advised adventure in pursuit of a lover. More broadly, this story provides a prolific woman writer’s point of view on a common literary trope in 18th-century popular culture—that of the woman warrior who disguises herself as a man in military uniform to pursue her soldier-or-sailor lover. 

The correspondent whom Haywood “distinguishes” by the name “Claribella,” who might actually have been Haywood herself, opens the letter stating the story of the “heroine” who she “shall distinguish by the name of Aliena” is “exactly true in every circumstance.” In the same sentence, she states the story also “has in it something equally surprising with any celebrated romance presented to us.” That the (fictional or nonfictional) correspondent not only devotes resources of time, energy and space to claim the story was “exactly” true, but also “in every circumstance,” anticipates (1) the value that nonfiction as opposed to fiction held, at least for this particular readership and (2) that this readership was accustomed to a blending of fact and fiction in the same work, thus necessitating the truth claim for “every circumstance.” (A similar statement would not, for instance, appear in now-traditional journalism today.) During Haywood’s lifetime, 1693-1756, however, the boundaries between fact and fiction were even more fluid than they are now. Early novelists—such as Haywood herself, as well as Defoe and Richardson—combined the “truth” that novel-readers craved as the genre withstood gendered criticism in comparison with the “feminine” genre of romance. ¹² They also blended the “truth” of epistolary correspondence into their novels—see Frances Burney’s Evelina and Richardson’s Clarissa—for added legitimacy, and some, such as Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, even, at first, masqueraded as truth. ¹³ Further, the referral to the “true” subject of the story, whose “fictional” name is given as “Aliena,” as a “heroine” ¹⁴ contributes to the perception of this text as a historic piece of “literary journalism.” ¹⁵ That Haywood, in one sentence, touts the value of the story for its blend of “truth” (as in the genre of history) and its seductive form of storytelling (as in the genre of the romance) links this, Haywood’s first (and most successful) foray into journalism, to her earlier, amatory fictions, and illustrates the importance of The Female Spectator in general and of this book in particular for the history of both the novel and literary journalism/nonfiction. 

The story of Aliena is the (classically common) story of a woman who dresses in military garb to pass as a man to be closer to the (male) lover who jilted her. Like Haywood’s blend of fictional narrative technique with the seductive allure of the “true story,” the warrior woman trope that she presents in the form of the “heroine” Aliena also circulated in fictional and nonfictional stories during, and before, Haywood’s. Taking form in ancient and medieval mythical heroines of the West and the East, such as that of Joan of Arc and Fah Mulan, the warrior woman long inhabited popular myth, which has always enveloped truth in fiction. Lending truth to the female warrior “fiction,” in 1639-1651 during the Civil Wars of Britain, so many women disguised themselves as soldiers that Charles I issued a proclamation banning women from wearing men’s military clothing. By the second half of the 19th century, women were increasingly excluded from military service (excepting those serving as nurses). Until the mid-19th century, they served in unofficial roles of (feminized) labor: “cooks, nurses, midwives, seamstresses, laundresses, and even prostitutes” (“A Timeline of Women in the Military”). Women were welcomed into the military, then, so long as they, like Aliena and her warrior women predecessors, sought to serve caregiving-type roles, and/or the sexual needs of men. While the dwindling “true” cases of women serving in the military in the 18th century casts doubt on whether Aliena’s story was, in “fact,” a “true” one, it is also true that the trope had, like Haywood’s writing, historically inhabited the realms of both fiction and fact. 

Fiction and fact blend together in political persuasion techniques within the early novel but also within other genres, such as the British broadside ballad. As I have written elsewhere, ¹⁶  in a synthesis of military and companionate marriage markets and their marketing strategies—how they interweave and build on one another to accomplish similar, empire-serving goals—the warrior woman trope, densely occurring in the British broadside ballad, ¹⁷  reveals a connection between two expanding markets during and leading up to the long 18th century: the expanding British Empire and its market for soldiers, and the expanding institution of the companionate marriage and its demand for and demands on women. ¹⁸ Because the broadside ballad served as a vehicle for propagating and perpetuating male domination of women (as I and others such as Joy Wiltenburg, [19.  Wiltenburg, Joy. “The Literature of the Streets.” Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany. UP of Virginia, 1992, pp. 7-25.] Angela McShane, ¹⁹ and Sandra Clark ²⁰ have argued) Haywood’s “nonfictional” account and editorial on an “actual” woman who embodies this trope provides an example of how this trope was portrayed by the most prolific woman writer of the 18th century for her predominantly female, middle-to-upper-class audience. Haywood’s book 14 then serves to contrast not only the male domineering and empire-building agenda of broadside ballads; because it occupies a higher literary status than the cheaply printed broadside ballads, The Female Spectator provides a mid-to-upper-class stance on the woman warrior. Rather than an ideal to be celebrated, Haywood’s editorial portrays this trope as a “mad exploit” that is  “unfortunate” and ill-advised. Viewing the warrior woman trope through both kaleidoscopic lenses, of the broadside ballad and Haywood’s Female Spectator, provides a more complete picture of how this common trope circulated within multiple cultural facets. 

In order to understand Haywood’s position on Claribella’s letter in The Female Spectator, it is helpful to understand the woman warrior trope as it circulated in popular culture during and leading up to the long 18th century, in the popular, low-brow genre of the broadside ballad. These ballads were printed, cheaply, on “broad sides,” set to church tunes, hawked on the streets and sung in alehouses. At least 113 of these ballads popularly depict a woman dressing in a military uniform to pursue her military lover at sea, to varying degrees of success: sometimes she is punished for her foray into military/male culture when she and/or her lover dies; sometimes she is rewarded for her bravery, loyalty and military prowess through marriage and/or through a monetary reward (commission and/or dowry). All the time, though, the covering-up of her feminine characteristics with the “male” uniform serves not to empower the woman for her full, integrated “self” but to proclaim to women and society that women are valuable—marriageable—when they make themselves useful by embracing the colonial and military goals of the patriarchal structure at large, supporting king and country while pursuing the ultimate goal for a woman: marriage. ²¹ Haywood’s take on Aliena critiques this popular glorification. 

One purpose of the ballads, as I have written elsewhere, ²² was not only to recruit the “right” kind of (loyal or desperate, depending on your point of view) woman into the marriage market for the newly expanding British military and middle class: these ballads also served to intimidate and persuade men into joining the military (a goal which, given close-reading of book 14, it is doubtful that Haywood shared). By unifying the love song with military glory—through unquestioned loyalty of the woman warrior—these ballads showcased feminine and masculine virtues, first by subverting, then by reinstating them. ²³ “By far the most common vehicle for the military recruitment ballad was the love song, a remarkable and perhaps counter-intuitive aspect of the genre,” McShane writes (132): “The final inducement for any man thinking of backing out came when his young love would offer to disguise herself and enlist with him” (133). The warrior woman ballad, then, served to promote stability in gender roles of active (male) and passive (female)—something that Haywood’s work deconstructed throughout her career, both in her early amatory fiction and in her later news periodicals such as The Parrot. Warrior women ballads, like broadside ballads in general, were primarily written by men and for men to serve male interests. The underlying purpose of these ballads was to promote female virtue in service of the British Empire. While the broadside ballad deployed the warrior woman to perpetuate patriarchal goals of expanding the British Empire and the companionate marriage simultaneously, marketing the warrior woman as the perfect, most loyal match for the military man, Haywood, her critical stance in book 14 shows, was not “buying” it. 

The military uniform was the primary vehicle enabling the warrior woman to make her (at times, mock-) heroic journey. In the popular balladry, the military uniform assumes a magical quality; even the daintiest virginal maiden can perform heroic deeds while in it. It is so effective that the uniform performs the work of seduction for its wearer. Simultaneously, the warrior woman is so naturally attractive, dainty and feminine that, it is presented as, some men cannot help but feel attracted to her in uniform. Men such as the lieutenant in Aliena’s story fall in love on sight. Claribella writes, “The lieutenant eyed her attentively all the time she was speaking, and was seized with something which he had never felt before, and at that time was far from being able to account for; and this secret impulse it was that made him unable to refuse her request” (p. 6). Like the captain whom Aliena pursues, the male soldier-or-sailor lover in popular ballads does little to encourage and even discourages the warrior woman’s pursuit of him. Unlike some broadside ballads, though, Aliena’s captain does not consider her disguise as proof of her loyalty, but rather counters that “it is a proof of the violence” of her love and insists that “it is time alone can assure me of felicity with the lady in question”—rather than what Claribella/Haywood terms “the mad exploit she had undertaken” (p. 14). 

Highly formulaic, the vast majority of the warrior women ballads end in marriage that rewards the warrior woman for her declared, then proven, loyalty. In stark contrast to this trope, Haywood’s Aliena is not rewarded for what Haywood terms as her “mad exploit” with marriage, but rather receives an additional, harsher snub by her military lover, and, due to the publication of her scandalous actions by her family when they went looking for her, the “censure” and condemnation of “everyone” in “this iron-hearted age” along with it (p. 1). She writes, 

I wonder any parent or relation should not tremble at publishing a fault, which, if concealed, might possibly be the last; but, if divulged, is, for the most part, but the beginning or prelude to a continued series of vice and ignominy. I am very much afraid the friends of Aliena have been too forgetful of this so necessary a maxim:—the surprise and indignation at her elopement, when they first discovered it, hurried them perhaps to enquiries, which, though they could not be blamed for making, should, notwithstanding, have been done with all the privacy imaginable.

(p. 19-20)

In the majority of the broadside ballads, the military is so glorified that it replaces the domestic patriarch in the important and male-domineering civil custom of marriage. By contrast, Haywood, in this story and in The Female Spectator’s book 2 regarding the conduct of military gentlemen, does not participate in such glorification, but rather tempers it with a dose of reality (or realism): that families should not publicize the behavior of such women and should conceal it “as much as possible … from the knowledge of the world” in order that her “future regularity of conduct” would atone “for the errors of the past” (p. 19). Viewing Haywood’s take on this trope in The Female Spectator alongside and in contrast to these ballads, which were contemporaneous to her writing and with which her readers would more than likely be familiar, shows just how subversive to the status quo that Haywood’s writing could be, even in her late writing such as that in the Female Spectator previously deemed as conservative. This book does not blindly uphold societal standards for women; consistent with the “spectating” theme, it sees through them and as a result, is able to advise women on how to realistically work through them. 

One ballad, “Maudlin, The Merchant’s Daughter of Bristol,” printed as early as 1586 and as late as 1868—over a period of 282 years that encompassed Haywood’s life span—concludes as follows: “Their wishes she denied not. / but wedded them to hearts delight. / Her gentle master she desired, / to be her father and at church to give her then / It was fulfill’d as she requi’d / Unto the joyes of all good men” (emphasis mine). After Maudlin’s adventures, she becomes an object bringing joy to “all good men.” The ballad opens with her loyalty to “a gallant youth” of whom her friends and family did not approve—“Behold the Touchstone of true Love, Maudlin the Merchants daughter of Bristow Town, Whose firm affection nothing could move …”—and ends rewarding her proven loyalty with marriage. She has a new “master” to give her away, the “ship’s master” who let her disguise herself as his “ship’s boy” to follow her lover abroad, where her loyalty is tested. She rebuts the advances of the ship’s master, who falls in love with her, and saves her lover from being killed. Her father is now dead, but that is perhaps for the best: The old type of (domestic) patriarchy dies off to make room for the new, colonial, aggressive one. 

Contrast this typical take on the warrior woman trope, in the, again, male-dominated form of the broadside ballad, with Haywood’s, and you can see just how subversive, and protofeminst, books in The Female Spectator could be. Aliena is punished for dressing as a male and attempting to join the British Navy, while Maudlin is—supposedly—rewarded. However she might be rewarded monetarily, she also is objectified, in being passed from one male patriarchal figure to the other. Aliena, operating in not a ballad but instead grounded in supposed reality of nonfiction prose, does not marry anyone, neither the captain whom she initially pursued nor his friend and first lieutenant, whom Haywood refers to as a “man of honour” who fell in love with Aliena due to her appearance and despite his better judgment. Instead, she returns home and is left to have an acquaintance such as Claribella defend her in a letter to the editor, only to have her actions censured again by the Female Spectator and used as a cautionary tale to warn women against. While this initially appears to be a conservative take on what could be (and has been) construed as an empowering action of the woman warrior, Haywood’s editorial critiques Aliena’s behavior due to its incompatibility with the social norms that governed women on the marriage market. 

Due to constricting gender roles for women in “this iron-hearted age,” as “Claribella” puts it, Aliena would not be celebrated for her military prowess such as other warrior women, nor would she be rewarded with marriage or increased wealth. Claribella/Haywood begins her narrative by acknowledging “how ready everyone is, on the least breach of decorum, to censure and condemn, without considering either the force of that passion … or what particular circumstances may have concurred” (p. 1). For women like Aliena, their “fault alone engrosses the discourse and attention of the town, and few there are will take the pains to enquire if any excuses may be made for it: all the misfortunes her inadvertency brings upon her are unpitied, and looked upon as a just punishment; all her former merit is no more remembered; and people no longer allow her to be possessed of any virtues, if once detected in transgressing one” (p. 1). Taken in context with Haywood’s other writings on disguises and the risks involved—a group of young sailors comes close to raping her when “pinching her on the ribs, as boys frequently do to one another, one of them found she had breasts” (p. 7)—and with military gentlemen’s emphasis on “glory” rather than “love,” The Female Spectator’s book 14 realistically provides advice to women and women’s families at the intersections of the expanding military and marriage markets, and of fiction and nonfiction. In this way, this miniature, novel-like “book” sheds light on how fiction and nonfiction operate within Haywood’s writing, and by extension, within fictional realism and literary nonfiction/journalism as they separated and converged, defining one another in the long 18th century. 

About This Edition

First issued by Gardner as a monthly periodical for two years, April 1744 to May 1746, The Female Spectator’s popularity spurred Gardner (and his successor, H. Gardner) to reissue it in four volumes two years later, from 1748 to 1771, resulting in seven (official) editions over 27 years. Haywood’s periodical was popular enough that in 1746, pirated editions began to surface out of Dublin. To compete with the piracies, Gardner began reprinting in the cheaper duodecimo format in 1748, 1750, 1755, 1776, and 1771. In 1775, the (non-numbered) edition issued in London and Glasgow with different title pages was the last edition to be printed for 226 years (Fair Philosopher, p. 194). 

The highly acclaimed critical edition of The Female Spectator (1744-1746) published as part of the six-volume Pickering & Chatto Selected Works of Eliza Haywood in 2001-2002 marked the first release of Haywood’s 960-page, 24-book periodical in its entirety since the 18th century. The editors sought to incorporate Haywood into the canon as “more than” an amatory novelist. King writes that, contrary to previous scholarly opinion, Haywood and her publisher aimed for The Female Spectator to earn a genteel readership during its time and in “futurity” (King, “Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator”). The Pickering & Chatto Selected Works is also likewise available for an upscale readership (with a $200+ price tag). This free edition aims to make part of Haywood’s periodical available, glossed and edited for a wider audience that includes scholars, graduate and undergraduate students.

Because scholars agree that The Female Spectator was never revised, by Haywood or anyone else, and, as Newman points out, “informal sight collation suggests that bona fide later editions were merely reset and, as the century wore on, shorn of long s’s, capitalized nouns, and so forth” (p. 52), this edition is based on the first edition published by Gardner, dated 1745, from the Harvard University Houghton Library that was scanned for Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). 

Textual Note

The following emendations are included to improve the text’s readability: the long s (ſ) is replaced by the short s throughout; the 18th-century convention of capitalizing and italicizing non-proper nouns is not retained; line spacing and indentation is updated to reflect modern letter/dedicatory format; and inadvertent printing errors are silently corrected.

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Works Cited

“A Timeline of Women in the Army.” National Army Museum. Date accessed: 2020. 

Backscheider, Paula. “Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza, (1693?–1756). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2010.  

Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford UP, 1998. 

Clark, Sandra. “The Economics of Marriage in the Broadside Ballad.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 36, no. 1, 2003. 

Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: Origins of the English Novel. U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. 

Dugaw, Dianne. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850. 2nd ed., U. of Chicago Press, 1996. 

Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator, eds. Lynn Wright and Donald Newman. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 2006. 

Girten, Kristin. “Unsexed Souls: Natural Philosophy as Transformation in Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator Author(s).” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 55-74.

Haywood, Eliza. The Female Spectator volume I. London, T. Gardner, 1745.

— The Female Spectator volume III. London, T. Gardner, 1745. 

Hurl-Eamon, Jennine. Marriage & the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century: “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Oxford UP, 2014. 

King, Kathryn. A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. New York, Routledge, 2016. 

— “Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746): Making (and Unmaking) a Periodical ‘for Women,’” Editing Women’s Writing, 1670-1840, eds. Amy Culley and Anna Fitzer, Routledge, 2017, pp. 29-42. 

Koon, Helen. “Eliza Haywood and the Female Spectator.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1, 1978, pp. 43-55. 

McShane, Angela. “Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads.” Journal of Early Modern History, issue 1, no. 2, 2011, pp. 105-137. 

Plante, Kelly. “Marketing Empire: Military and Companionate Marriage Recruitment in Early English, ‘Warrior Women’ Broadside Ballads.” The Warrior Women Project, Wayne State University, 2020. Accessed: 24 April 2020. 

Pettegree, Andrew. The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself. Yale UP, 2014. 

Prescott, Sarah. Women, Authorship and Literary Culture 1690-1740. Springer, 2003. 

Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood (Women Writers in English 1350-1850), ed. Paula Backscheider. Oxford University Press, 1999. 

Wiltenburg, Joy. “The Literature of the Streets.” Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany. UP of Virginia, 1992, pp. 7-25. 

Notes