Privacy, Letters, and Constructing a (Fictional) Female Self in the History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

Within the first 70 pages of Eliza Haywood’s 1751 novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, vol. 2 (pp. 181-251), appear 13 letters: one to Mr. Trueworth from Mr. Staple (183); to Mr. Staple from Mr. Trueworth (187-188); from Mr. Staple to Miss Betsy Thoughtless (190-191); from “A.Z.” (actually, Betsy’s frenemy Flora) to “Sir” (Mr. Saving, Betsy’s sometime suitor) (198); from Thomas Thoughtless to Mr. Goodman (201-202); from Miss Forward to Miss Thoughtless (203-204); Frank Thoughtless to Betsy Thoughtless (204-205); from M. Trustee to Miss Betsy Thoughtless (206-207); from Miss Betsy Thoughtless to M. Trustee (213); to Miss Betsy Thoughtless from “Your most humble, Though concealed servant” (again, Flora) (216-217); Miss Forward to Miss Thoughtless (233); Miss Thoughtless to Miss Forward (243-244); To Mr. Trueworth from “Your well-wisher, And most thoughtful, Though unknown servant” (again, Flora) (250-251). In other words, letters comprise 21 out of 70, or 30 percent, of the pages from the ascent of Mr. Trueworth as Miss Betsy’s sole suitor to the assortment of situations that (spoiler alert) persuade him to subside. The sardonic narrator and paragraphs of dialogue fuel the other 70 percent of the buildup and demise of this ill-fated courtship. 

Surprisingly, it is not solely Miss Betsy’s character flaws such as thoughtlessness (or innocence, depending not only upon the beholder but also upon the emotional state of the beholder, as we shall see) that drive Mr. Trueworth away. Rather, as this section of the novel is driven by a combination of letters to and from particular friends (or frenemies, in the case of Flora), a trustworthy if tongue-in-cheek narrator, and direct dialogue, so too do a triumvirate of factors contribute to the demise of the relationship between Mr. Trueworth and Miss Betsy: these include Miss Betsy’s thoughtlessness (or innocence); Miss Betsy’s thoughtfulness (or compassion) for women beneath her status and situation; and Miss Betsy’s underestimation of, and previous unkindness to Flora, the personification of female envy that would contribute to rather than prevent other females’ social demise. 

During the first half of the eighteenth century, in which The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless was written and published, the primary signification of “Flora” was the goddess of flowers in Latin mythology, or “the personification of nature’s power in producing flowers,” 1598 to 1851 (“flora, n.” Oxford English Dictionary). According to the OED, the first instances documented of the other meanings that denote simply plants are listed as 1777, 1778, and 1790 (the exception being a descriptive catalogue meaning, in 1665) (“flora, n.” Oxford English Dictionary). In this way, the character Flora is named less straightforwardly as, say, Mr. Trueworth, whom she desired and who desires Miss Betsy, matching her nature by clashing with its traditional signification. The deception exercised by Flora, in the form of multiple forged letters, coupled with Miss Betsy’s careless (or carefree) attitude and resultant actions, destroy Miss Betsy’s first semi-serious courtship (as well as the previous and less serious one, with Mr. Saving). 

Flora’s forgeries take advantage of the lack of privacy in the first half of the eighteenth century. In Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self, Patricia Spacks writes, “Women in particular, as rendered in fiction, feel the need to defend their feelings against the metaphoric gaze of the social world or that of a would-be or prospective lover. But if privacy implies freedom from—from watchers, judges, gossips, sensation-seekers—it also connotes freedom to: to explore possibilities without fear of external censure. Privacy can constitute a form of enablement” (14). Throughout the first two volumes of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, Miss Betsy enjoys privacy—but just barely, and luckily, due to her good looks and good nature ascribing her thoughtless and potentially ruinous actions to the best intentions and innocence. The narrator creates a sense of suspense that hinges on readers’ sense of propriety as they become “watchers, judgers,” and “sensation-seekers” in reading her “history.” Even if Miss Betsy escapes Oxford relatively unscathed, her friendship with a prostitute and obstinacy with her suitor provide the proper soil for Flora’s forgeries to finally take root. While Betsy has no romantic “feelings” “to defend” “against the metaphoric gaze of the social world or that of a would-be or prospective lover,” she has other feelings that stay concealed: those of “pity” to fallen women such as Miss Forward, the working-class woman whose daughter she supports (and which support Flora twists from a “virtue” to a “vice”), and even for Mr. Goodman’s adulterous wife. Even after she discovers Miss Forward’s deceit, she says she will continue to feel “pity” but not friendship for her. It is Miss Betsy’s “pity” for women in their various states of “ruin,” then, that contributes to her eventual censure by a man of “True” “worth.” In this way, Miss Betsy Thoughtless serves as an early example of what Spacks terms as “privacy from” and “privacy to,” for fictional females. At first, Miss Betsy operates relatively “without fear of external censure.” It is part of the history of her education in this early female bildungsroman, to slowly start to fear not only her own internal censure, which she experiences a few times up to this latest forged letter, but external censure, to which men who consort with Miss Forward such as the friend of Mr. Trueworth and the libertine, need fear only if they consort seriously with a woman such as Miss Betsy who consorts with her (as the narrator is keen to point out). 

To return to the rapid rate at which “true” and “false” letters forward the rise and fall of this fictional relationship’s action, I would like to draw on the recent (2018) work by Rachael King in Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres. King concludes her book, in which she argues that the letter served as a “bridge” genre between the epistolary and the modern novel, in a chapter on how Austen develops her novel from the first-epistolary, then-non-epistolary models provided by Burney and Edgeworth. She writes, “Ultimately, I argue, these authors [Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen] contended with the unstable character of epistolary narration by turning letters into plot points, rather than using them as an exchange-oriented mediation between writer and reader” (King 161), arguing that the latter part of the eighteenth and the beginning part of the nineteenth century saw the displacement of the letter-as-structure in favor of the letter-as-plot-point, once their bridging function had been adequately accomplished and the novel had adequately, almost, been elevated. “William Warner has argued that the early eighteenth century witnessed an effort to ‘elevate’ the novel by differentiating it from the ‘novels of amorous intrigue’ associated with Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood,” King writes (156). However, it is not in the plot’s hinging on letters that Miss Betsy’s history differs as a “novel of amorous intrigue,” but rather in the varying amounts of fictional and nonfictional privacy afforded the heroines by the authors, such as Haywood and Austen, that these novels “differ” (or are “elevated,” depending on one’s point of view). 

The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless in 1751 makes frequent use of letters. However, as we have seen, only 30% of the above-examined pivotal plot portion in the second/middle volume of the novel is comprised of letters; the rest of the work is accomplished by the narrator and dialogue. The true difference between Haywood’s early female bildungsroman and, say, Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, as discussed in King’s final chapter, is the heroine’s interiority and the extent to which readers and other characters can or cannot penetrate into it. While Miss Betsy does not continue to enjoy privacy from, as Spacks puts it, other characters once Flora’s forgeries and her own innocence (or thoughtlessness) contrive toward her relationship’s demise, she does continue to enjoy privacy from the audience through the lack of interiority offered by either the narrator or the letters. In this regard, Miss Betsy is “in fact” even more “thoughtless” than Miss Morland and even Miss Price. 

 Works Cited 

Haywood, Eliza. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, ed. Christine Blouch. Broadview, 1998. 

King, Rachael. Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 

Spacks, Patricia. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self. University of Chicago Press, 2003.