The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood

Whicher, George Frisbie, 1889-1954Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
400K words
Chapters
40

Tags

English Originals Literary Figures Historical ReappraisalSocial ObservationWoman WriterLiterary AnecdoteLiterary GiantsRomantic TaleBiographical StudyAcademic StudyLiterary CriticismFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood by George Frisbie WhicherAuthor: Whicher, George Frisbie, 1889-1954,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jan 1, 2004

Editor's review

This book is a research biography by George Frisbie Whicher of Eliza Haywood, the prolific eighteenth-century English woman writer, and belongs to the literature of English literary studies. Its value lies not in sensational author anecdotes but in situating Haywood's fiction within the context of her time: how a woman writer known for sentimental novels and popular narrative established a place in a male-dominated literary world, and how her works reflect contemporary ideas about love, marriage, and the situation of women. The book's tracing of her oeuvre is useful for understanding the transition of the eighteenth-century English novel from romance toward realism. The prose is academic, dense with citations and bibliographical information, and slow-paced; it suits supplementary reading for essay writing or topical study, and also suits readers interested in early English novel history and the history of women's writing, who may read selected chapters. As a public-domain e-book, it is closer to a searchable research text than to casual reading.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and introduction first to identify the author's research questions, then decide which chapters to read closely.
  2. Read alongside selected works by Haywood, comparing commentary with the texts for a more concrete understanding.
  3. Keep notes, jotting down titles and years mentioned in the book for later reference.
  4. Read the original English edition; when citations are dense, skip ahead and grasp the main point of each chapter.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40

FAQ

Is this book Haywood's own autobiography? No. It is a research work by Whicher examining Haywood's life and fiction, a literary biography and study by another hand rather than an account by the subject herself.
Can I read it without a background in English literature? Yes, but patience is required. The book involves many eighteenth-century works and names; without background the threads may seem scattered, so it is advisable to acquire some basic knowledge of English novel history first.
Is this book suitable for writing papers? It is suitable as a research overview and source of bibliographical leads. It offers analysis of the works' development and historical context, but citations should still be checked against the original texts and editions and supplemented with more recent scholarship.
What should I note when reading the e-book? Public-domain e-books tend to have plain formatting, and notes and bibliography may be less prominent than in print. Use reading software that supports search and annotation to locate names and titles quickly.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Whicher, George Frisbie, 1889-1954 Author · American · 1889–1954

George Frisbie Whicher (1889–1954) was an American literary scholar and professor who taught for many years at Amherst College and devoted himself mainly to the study of American literature. One of his works is held in this collection: The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood, a study of the life and romance writing of the eighteenth-century English novelist Eliza Haywood. It combines biographical narrative with textual analysis, tracing the outlines of its subject's life and relating them to her fiction, and it reflects the careful, well-grounded use of historical sources characteristic of literary historians. Public information about his personal life is limited; his scholarly influence lies chiefly in American literature and in the study of the eighteenth-century English novel, and his work is still consulted by researchers in these fields.