Everyone—to venture a universal truth—has heard of Jane Austen: few outside academia will have heard of Eliza Haywood. The Eliza Haywood exhibition at the Chawton House Library aims to introduce readers to Haywood, and potentially allow visitors to the nearby Jane Austen’s House Museum to place Austen herself in context.

The exhibition takes the visitor through different stages of the author’s long career. A replica of a woman’s costume from the period alludes to Haywood the actress. We begin the literary career with the success of Love in Excess (1719), and her involvement with the circle that revolved around writer and entrepreneur Aaron Hill. Others who believed the association with Hill might prove beneficial were the poet Martha Fowke Sansom and poet and playwright Richard Savage. The group exchanged gushing poems of mutual praise, and Haywood’s poem on Hill, whom she gave his coterie name of ‘Hillarius,’ is offered as a sample. From this promising early phase we see also indications of Haywood’s literary influence, with the anonymous author of The Prude (1724) naming her novel The Rash Resolve (1723) as an inspiration. Within the Hillarian circle, Haywood enjoyed acceptance and a degree of acclaim, until her depiction of Sansom as the sexually insatiable Gloatitia in Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1724) produced Savage’s satirical portrait of her as a ‘cast-off Dame’, panting for renown.

After the split with the Hillarians, Haywood was a professional writer, relying on herself, and she cornered the market for amatory fiction with the twenty or more novellas she published in the 1720s: she could produce short, popular fiction at speed, as the volumes displayed make clear. The popularity of that fiction inspired Alexander Pope’s enduring portrait of her as ‘yon Juno of majestic size,/With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes’, a potential prize in the pissing context between booksellers Edmund Curll and William Chetwood in the first version of the Dunciad (1728). The two ‘babes of love’ at her waist might be her scurrilous works or, perhaps, her illegitimate children. Haywood was now disreputable, it seemed: Jonathan Swift was able to describe her as a ‘stupid, infamous, scribbling woman’, despite never having read her. Contemporaries such as Penelope Aubin and Samuel Richardson repudiated her fiction, but also borrowed from it.

The ‘old story’ of Eliza Haywood had it that Pope’s attack deterred her from further writing of the salacious kind and initiated her moral reform, and the publications from the 1740s are certainly higher-toned. We have the handsomely presented periodical The Female Spectator, the first such work written by a woman, for women. However, Haywood’s turn to other literary modes and genres in the 1740s was only another phase of her ongoing self-reinvention. She was active as a writer of conduct-books, translations, and hard-to-categorize, politically inflected works such as Epistles to the Ladies (1749). A painting from the period locates the pamphlet shop on the Piazza at Covent Garden from which she sold a range of works under her own imprint in the early 1740s. In the opening pages of The Invisible Spy (1755), which named the author only as ‘Explorabilis’, Haywood toyed with her own mutable masks and identities: ‘Some will doubtless take me for a philosopher,—others for a fool;—with some I shall pass for a man of pleasure,—with others for a stoic … but whether I am any of these, or whether I am even a man or a woman, they will find it, after all their conjectures, as difficult to discover as the longitude’.

In the Library’s Oak Room, Haywood’s conduct-books—A Present for a Servant-Maid (1743), The Wife (1755), The Husband (1756)—are entertainingly juxtaposed with their nineteenth-century and modern counterparts. The genre still survives, whether in the form of Woman’s Own, The Lady, or The Newly-Weds’ Instruction Manual: Essential Information, Trouble-shooting, Tips, and Advice for the First Year of Marriage. The last of these dates from 2010. Given her often critical treatment of marriage as an institution, Haywood might have approved of the Ladybird Book for Adults’ ironic take on The Wife. Beside an idealised illustration of a mother and child, we read: ‘This is a wife. Looks happy doesn’t she? That’s because she’s on her second glass of wine.’

The recovery of Eliza Haywood from obscurity is demonstrated by a range of scholarly works: Patrick Spedding’s comprehensive bibliography is here, and Kathryn King’s Political Biography (2012), as well as twentieth- and twenty-first century editions of the novels from Kentucky University Press, Broadview, Oxford University Press, and the two hardback editions published in the Chawton House Library Series of Women’s Novels by Pickering & Chatto. Seminal works of feminist scholarship on display include Ros Ballaster’s Seductive Forms (1992) and Toni Bowers’ Force or Fraud (2011). The amatory fiction that made Haywood’s name, and earned her a living, is now deemed worthy of study, as is one of its most expert practitioners. The final case in the exhibition takes a wide view of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), tracing influences back to the seventeenth-century French salon romance, and forward to writers such as Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Anne Brontë. Then we turn to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), with its defence of the novel as a genre, and, implicitly, women authors.

There is much in the exhibition that allows the visitor to place Haywood in context. The quality of some of the volumes themselves—an attractive French translation of The Rash Resolve from 1801, for example—is indicative of the reception Haywood once enjoyed. What we don’t really have is Haywood the person, but then that is a difficulty with which all Haywood scholars struggle. There is the portrait by George Vertue that graced the 1724 Works, but little else. Haywood left instructions for any personal items to be destroyed after her death, instructions that seem to have been faithfully followed. There are just four letters in existence and it might have given visitors some sense of contact with the life if one or some of these had been reproduced at the exhibition. Such biographical information as they provide may be just as fictitious as Haywood’s literary personae—the letters address potential patrons—but they do at least provide a sample of the author’s own handwriting. However, this is a minor reservation, and it is a tribute to the exhibition’s success that all the works by Haywood that had been available in the Library’s bookshop had sold out by the time of my visit. Much has been assembled in a small space, and the visitor will come away with a sense of Haywood’s versatility, professionalism and enduring relevance.

Naming, Shaming, Reclaiming: The ‘Incomparable’ Eliza Haywood is at Chawton House Library from 20th March to 4th June 2017.