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Trading Sex for Secrets in Haywood's Love in Excess Scott Black This article addresses the ways that recent historians of the novel have construed Eliza Haywood and her first work, Love in Excess (1719). It responds to Paula Backscheider's remark, "Suddenly Haywood is everywhere. Yet the study of her individual works is proceeding much too slowly. ... Less generalized comment on Haywood and closer study ofher texts is needed."' I will look closely at a particular moment in her first novel, a moment unexplained by the current critical paradigms applied to Haywood, and thus one that offers us a chance to be surprised by her. In turning from readings organized by sociological effects to ones organized by narrative effects, we can begin to recognize a Haywood who was not only a ???t?a? writer but a woman writer, one who grappled not only with questions ofidentity but also with issues ofform, and who belongs in our histories of the novel because her texts are self-conscious explorations of narrative. 1 Paula R. Backscheider, "The Shadow ofan Author: Eliza Haywood," Eitfileenlli-isiiluiy Iulion 11 (1998), 83. More recently Backscheider has explicitly drawn attention to Haywood's "experimentation with form," suggesting that narrative experiments are a continual feature of Haywood's works, beginning with Ijrne in Excess. "The Story of Eliza Haywood's Novels: Caveats and Questions," Tlu· I'nssioti/ite Fictions ofEliza Haywood, ed. Kristen T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000), pp. 20, 22-23. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 2,January 2003 208 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION The current critical debate about Love in Excess can be mapped in terms of the ways readers and reading are said to be depicted in the text. For Ros Ballaster, the female reader identifies with the victim of the seduction narrative; forJohn Richetti, this kind of identification is assimilated to a broader development of subjectivity; and for William Warner, the reader identifies with the seducer, who represents the active seeker ofserial pleasures in the print marketplace.2 I will consider each account in turn, noting that the way in which readers are said to read (their point of entry into the text and what they are imagined to do with it) governs the way in which the novel is imagined to participate in various histories of the novel. Ballaster puts Haywood at the head of a woman's tradition of romance, Richetti places her in a general history of the novel, and Warner has her participating in an even more general history of print media. Each ofthese histories ofthe early novel depends on a particular kind of access to the text, a particular reader's position that is figured by relationships in the text. In looking at a different kind ofrelationship in the text, I will suggest a differentway ofunderstanding the reader's relation to the text. This different exigency ofreading points, in turn, to another way to situate the novel in its social context—a context defined not by a choice betiueen aesthetics and the market, but by an aesthetics of'the market that was articulated in terms ofthe contemporary discourse of "novelty." Reading Haywood In the new critical economy of the early novel, sex sells, again. Categories ofgender and desire have helped us replot the story ofthe novel's rise to include the tastes ofEliza Haywood's first readers (who bought her novels in droves), notjust the predilections of the first historians of the novel (who kept her earlier salacious novels out of 2 Ros Ballaster, Sedmlive Forms: Women 'sAmatory Fictionfrom 1684 In 1 740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992);John Richetti, The English Novel in llislmy 1700-1780 (NewYork: Routledge, 1999); William Warner, LicensingEnleilairimrnt: TIuElevation ofNovelHeadingin Britain, 1684-1750 (Beikeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1998). TRADING SEX FOR SECRETS209 their accounts and collections).8 Resisting the accretion of later judgments (whether Reeve's in the late eighteenth century, Barbauld's and Scott's in the early nineteenth century, or Ian Watt's in the twentieth) that privileged other kinds ofwriting and made the early part ofthe story, and Haywood's place in it, so intractable,'1 our accounts now try to understand notjust the development ofa...

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