Routledge Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, Part II

This text reprints selected non-fictional works by Haywood, with particular attention to the journalism, criticism, and "conduct and advice" material. Here, Haywood explicates and defends ideas on gender and culture that she develops obliquely elsewhere. Review 'Pettit and Blouch make the most far-reaching contribution to Haywood studies with their multi-volume set, of which only Part I was available for this review... The critical apparatus of the edition is useful without being intrusive, assuming a specialist audience. The textual introductions are kept deliberately brief, headnotes deal primarily with bibliographical history and the place of the work in Haywood's oeuvre, and the annotations make no attempt to be exhaustive, keeping the focus on the "rich compendia of data" that are Haywood's texts (I.xii)... Blouch's biography makes a number of significant corrections to previous views of Haywood's life, providing a more accurate biographical context for the works published in the edition and for current critical understanding of Haywood's life and career.' - Kathleen B Grathwol, Eighteenth-Century Studies 'On the evidence of the first three volumes of a six-volume collection due to be completed by September 2001 (and not completed at the time of writing), Alexander Pettit and his dedicated team have produced an edition which will not only alter the image of Eliza Haywood as the Jackie Collins of her generation but also of that generation itself. This Haywood and the picture of eighteenth-century gentry London life drawn by the writings collected here are a revelation.' - Ros Ballaster, Review of English Studies 'The Selected Works of Eliza Haywood - six stout, handsomely produced volumes, containing over 2,500 pages - can reproduce only a small fraction of Haywood's voluminous oeuvre. One of the many attractions of this superbly edited collection, however, is that it avoids the obvious choices in favour of material not available elsewhere... Readers of the Selected Works are well served both by the judicious choice of texts and by the headnotes to each item, which provide valuable bibliographical and historical information. The headnotes draw, with full acknowledgement, on Patrick Spedding's Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto, a work that promises to bring clarity to our hitherto murky understanding of the publication history of Haywood's works. There is also an extensive biographical introduction by Christine Blouch, furnishing much new material on Haywood's life and writing career... Each volume, in addition, contains a textual introduction by Pettit, explaining the principles by which the texts have been established... The annotations by Pettit and his fellow editors contain a wealth of pioneering research. In almost every case, they represent the first notes ever furnished to the work in question.' - Peter Sabor, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 'The high standards of scholarship and print publication met by the Selected Works of Eliza Haywood are not in and of themselves startling. They are, indeed, what one has come to expect from its general and textual editor, Alexander Pettit, and its publisher, Pickering & Chatto... Before this publication, scholars had to spend countless uncomfortable hours frozen in front of microfilm machines in over air-conditioned libraries or travelling across the country or the Atlantic ocean to read hard-to-get Haywood texts. Even then, it was difficult to glimpse something of the overall shape of Haywood's work. Readers of this edition not only have a selection of works that balances the variety of other Haywood texts now available, but they also have the gem-like headnotes that generously and provocatively open the texts to a wide variety of crucial investigations. Without being prescriptive, the headnotes condense and purify an impressive biographic, bibliographic, textual, annotative and cultural knowledge of Haywood and her contemp