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Sarah Prescott “erotic” fiction of Haywood intersect in crucial ways. Both writers are preoccupied with the representation of female virtue and explore this concern by utilising variations upon the standard seduction narrative. Haywood and Aubin both suggest that female innocence, however sincere, is often precarious. The centrality of a female protagonist in relation to her social and sexual relations with men is also common to both writers. Indeed, the place of women in society and the particular codes of morality and conduct that prescribe and determine women’s behaviour is a central concern of the seduction narrative. The commonality of the seduction plot in the work of both authors points to its popular appeal in the 1720s. A parallel reading of their novels suggests not only that their audience was not substantially different but also indicates that a contemporary reader would not necessarily have recognised a marked divergence between the fiction of Eliza Haywood and Penelope Aubin – although the content of Aubin’s texts is considerably more violent. My discussion of the fiction of Aubin and Haywood points to the need to reconsider the terms of feminist literary history as it formulates conflicting traditions of female authorship in the early eighteenth century. As well as challenging the accepted view of Aubin and Haywood’s work as “moral” and “immoral”, or “pious” and “amatory”, I also contend that Aubin adapts and responds to Haywood’s fiction in a manner which reveals her debt to Haywood rather than her revulsion. The similarity between Aubin and Haywood also points to Aubin’s awareness of the market place towards which she pitched her literary production. She takes aspects from both the best-selling novels of 1719 – Love in Excess and Robinson Crusoe – and provides a careful blend of both approaches; although I would argue that her use of Haywood and the amatory seduction narrative is more sustained and integral to her plotting as well as to her interests as a woman writer.
Eliza Haywood and Elizabeth Singer Rowe Elizabeth Singer Rowe holds a key place in the history of women’s writing and the novel. In addition to her contemporary popularity and fame, Rowe’s devout and virtuous image is seen to justify the claim that by the mid-eighteenth century female literary production was primarily authorised by the woman writer’s status as moral exemplar and spiritual guide. In this narrative, the woman writer rejects the amatory misdemeanours of previous women novelists, in life and in fiction, to uphold an acceptable ideal of femininity and domestic virtue.[17] The didactic effect of a woman’s texts therefore depends on a knowledge of the woman writer herself as an “actual” example, adding weight to the exemplary models of virtuous sentiment contained in her work. Elizabeth Singer Rowe has been credited with inaugurating this shift in women’s writing and her critical reception and popularity have been viewed as an early example of the increasingly restrictive “terms of acceptance” for the woman novelist in
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