SOURCE: "Voice and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Haywood to Burney," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XIX, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 263-72.

In the following essay, Richetti analyzes female speech in Haywood's works, especially in The Rash Resolve, and compares it with that depicted by other eighteenth-century novelists.

Inescapably but also elusively, gender must affect speech. Given their distinct positions in the hierarchy of social power, men and women must have different relationships to language and use it in different ways. In the special speaking we call writing, similar differences must also somehow be at work, and feminist criticism is partly defined by its attempts to mark those features that seem to identify specifically female writing. And yet there is little agreement about just what those features are. As Elaine Showalter summarizes the issues, female language lacks precise definition, since "there is no mother tongue, no genderlect spoken by...