On “Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746): Making (and Unmaking) a Periodical ‘for Women,’” chapter by Kathryn King in Editing Women’s Writing, 1670-1840
In this book chapter within an edited volume on editing 18th-century women’s writing, Kathryn King recounts her experience editing the highly acclaimed critical edition of Eliza Haywood’s the Female Spectator (1744-1746) published as part of the six-volume Pickering & Chatto Selected Works of Eliza Haywood (2001-2002), which marked the first release of Haywood’s 960-page, 24-“book” periodical in entirety in print since the 18th century, and she reflects on how the experience remade her own understanding of Haywood and how it has reshaped Haywood scholarship in the years that have followed. The edition, carefully edited and glossed, she writes, was published two years before Gale’s ECCO launched (2004). After publication of the edition, which followed a commercial model for deadlines in order to produce a Haywood edition quickly for the scholarly readership that was demanding it in light of her addition to the canon as “more than” an amatory novelist, it is clear that contrary to previous scholarly opinion, Haywood and her publisher aimed for the Female Spectator to earn a genteel/respectable readership during its time and in “futurity.” King writes that the edition functioned “as a kind of Call for Papers” and hopes that it will continue to inspire texts of Haywood’s contemporaneous periodicalists (such as, of interest to me, Charlotte Lennox’s) to play larger roles in the field of periodical studies. The Pickering & Chatto Selected Works of Eliza Haywood commands an elite price. In hopes that I could use this edition of volume 3 of the Female Spectator as a model/inspiration for my own, digital mini-edition, I tried locating it in my university library library and on several websites, and though it was just published in 2002, it is not available for under $200; nor is the Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, published about the same time, also mentioned in this chapter. All the more reason to produce a digital edition of it (beyond the ECCO paywall).
Work Cited
King, Kathryn. “Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746): Making (and Unmaking) a Periodical ‘for Women,’” Editing Women’s Writing, 1670-1840, eds. Amy Culley and Anna Fitzer, Routledge, 2017, pp. 29-42.
