Selections from The Female Spectator

by Haywood, Eliza; Spacks, Patricia Meyer

• ISBN13: 9780195109214
• ISBN10: 019510921X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-01-28
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

After Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood was the most important English female novelist of the early eighteenth century. She also edited several serial newspapers, the most important of which, the Female Spectator , was the first modern periodical written by a woman and addressed to a female audience. This fully annotated collection of articles selected from the Female Spectator includes romantic and satiric fiction, moral essays, and social commentary, covering the broad range of concerns shared by eighteenth-century middle-class women. Perhaps most compelling to a twentieth-century audience is the evidence of what we might be tempted to call feminist awareness. By no means revolutionary in her attitudes, Haywood nonetheless perceives the inequities of her periods social conditions for women. She offers pragmatic advice, such as how to avoid disastrous marriages, how to deal with wandering husbands, and what kind of education women should seek. The essays also report on a broad range of social actualities, from the craze for tea drinking and the dangers of gossip to the problem of compulsive gambling. They allude to such larger matters as politics, war, and diplomacy, and promote the importance of science and the urgency of developing informed relations with nature.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii	(2)
Introduction	ix	(12)
Selected Bibliography	xxi	(1)
Note on the Text	xxii	(1)
Acknowledgments	xxii
THE FEMALE SPECTATOR
Dedication to Volume I	3	(4)
From Book I	7	(16)
From Book II	23	(11)
From Book III	34	(20)
From Book IV	54	(8)
From Book V	62	(10)
From Book VI	72	(11)
From Book VIII	83	(15)
From Book X	98	(40)
From Book XIII	138	(17)
From Book XIV	155	(22)
From Book XV	177	(35)
From Book XVI	212	(13)
From Book XVII	225	(19)
From Book XIX	244	(7)
From Book XX	251	(8)
From Book XXI	259	(24)
From Book XXIII	283	(25)
From Book XXIV	308