| Name: |
Eliza Haywood |
| Variant Name: |
|
| Birth Date: |
|
| Death Date: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Gender: |
|
During her thirty-odd years of ferociously energetic activity as a writer, Eliza Haywood produced some seventy books, including more than sixty works of fiction--novels, secret histories or scandal chronicles, tales, and romances. The sheer quantity of her fiction lends it a certain importance, though that is by no means its only distinction. From the hot-blooded Love in Excess of 1719-1720 to the more sober Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy of 1753, Haywood's gifts as a storyteller held the attention of her audience, and some of her books were among the most successful and controversial (if not the most admired) works to be published during the first half of the eighteenth century. A woman of amazing personal resilience, tenacity, and adaptability, Haywood lived an unconventional life apart from her clergyman husband, and she was frequently the subject of scandalous gossip. In her professional life she was an actress, playwright, poet, journalist, translator, and publisher as well as a novelist; she survived vicious attacks from Alexander Pope and other leading literary figures, rolled with the tides of changing popular tastes, and managed to be more widely read over a longer period of time than all but a very few other writers of her day.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 3,713 words (approx. 12 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Eliza Haywood Access Pass.
