Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, Part II

'Pettit and Blouch make the most far-reaching contribution to Haywood studies with their multi-volume set, of which only Part I was available for this review... The critical apparatus of the edition is useful without being intrusive, assuming a specialist audience. The textual introductions are kept deliberately brief, headnotes deal primarily with bibliographical history and the place of the work in Haywood's oeuvre, and the annotations make no attempt to be exhaustive, keeping the focus on the "rich compendia of data" that are Haywood's texts (I.xii)... Blouch's biography makes a number of significant corrections to previous views of Haywood's life, providing a more accurate biographical context for the works published in the edition and for current critical understanding of Haywood's life and career.' - Kathleen B Grathwol, Eighteenth-Century Studies 'On the evidence of the first three volumes of a six-volume collection due to be completed by September 2001 (and not completed at the time of writing), Alexander Pettit and his dedicated team have produced an edition which will not only alter the image of Eliza Haywood as the Jackie Collins of her generation but also of that generation itself. This Haywood and the picture of eighteenth-century gentry London life drawn by the writings collected here are a revelation.' - Ros Ballaster, Review of English Studies 'The Selected Works of Eliza Haywood - six stout, handsomely produced volumes, containing over 2,500 pages - can reproduce only a small fraction of Haywood's voluminous oeuvre. One of the many attractions of this superbly edited collection, however, is that it avoids the obvious choices in favour of material not available elsewhere... Readers of the Selected Works are well served both by the judicious choice of texts and by the headnotes to each item, which provide valuable bibliographical and historical information. The headnotes draw, with full acknowledgement, on Patrick Spedding's Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto, a work that promises to bring clarity to our hitherto murky understanding of the publication history of Haywood's works. There is also an extensive biographical introduction by Christine Blouch, furnishing much new material on Haywood's life and writing career... Each volume, in addition, contains a textual introduction by Pettit, explaining the principles by which the texts have been established... The annotations by Pettit and his fellow editors contain a wealth of pioneering research. In almost every case, they represent the first notes ever furnished to the work in question.' - Peter Sabor, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 'The high standards of scholarship and print publication met by the Selected Works of Eliza Haywood are not in and of themselves startling. They are, indeed, what one has come to expect from its general and textual editor, Alexander Pettit, and its publisher, Pickering & Chatto... Before this publication, scholars had to spend countless uncomfortable hours frozen in front of microfilm machines in over air-conditioned libraries or travelling across the country or the Atlantic ocean to read hard-to-get Haywood texts. Even then, it was difficult to glimpse something of the overall shape of Haywood's work. Readers of this edition not only have a selection of works that balances the variety of other Haywood texts now available, but they also have the gem-like headnotes that generously and provocatively open the texts to a wide variety of crucial investigations. Without being prescriptive, the headnotes condense and purify an impressive biographic, bibliographic, textual, annotative and cultural knowledge of Haywood and her contemporaries, even as they offer insight into Haywood's generic complexities. Moreover, the annotations in this edition offer a wealth of information that itself forms a sizeable contribution to the modern Haywood scholarship... The Selected Works also makes use of yet another formidable source of Haywood scholarship, the forthcoming Bibliography of Eliza Haywood by Patrick Spedding. The headnotes to each of the texts chosen for inclusion in this volume are cross-referenced with Spedding's work to incorporate pertinent bibliographical data. This edition's use of both Spedding's research and Blouch's biographical information places it head and shoulders above other modern Haywood editions.' - Margaret Croskery, 1650-1850: Ideas Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era Read a review of this edition in TEXT Excerpt from this review: 'The difference between this edition and the kind of electronic edition as provided for the fifteen works of Haywood's fiction included in Eighteenth-Century Fiction is the degree of rigour applied to the preparation of the text and the editorial information offered to readers. For all its convenience to a Haywood editor, the database is designed primarily for searching, as shown by the immediate appearance of a search dialogue box as one enters. The electronic edition provides minimal information on the editorial principles adopted, such as the reason for the choice of copy-text and the particular copy chosen for keying, or the degree of fidelity to the copy-text, such as emendation (or not) of obvious errors or the retention/standardisation of typographic features in the original. Provision of this kind of information, together with the valuable headnotes and annotations is what makes the Selected Works more useful for most purposes to the presumed readers, "specialists" in the words of the general editor (1: xii), by which he means academic readers who are primarily critics interested in what Haywood wrote rather than "bibliographers concerned with the vicissitudes of textual transmission" (1: 276). It is refreshing to encounter an edition which has such a clear idea of its presumed audience. The general editor notes with candour that the pricing structure and distribution system of the publisher "militate against the pretense of address to the nonspecialist reader" (1: xii), and it is true that the cost of these works will probably mean that most copies will finish up in institutional collections rather than the personal libraries of individual scholars. Most graduate students would think twice about buying personal copies, and with library budgets being increasingly stretched, some smaller institutions may feel it too specialist for their collections. Having such a clear notion of the audience means that the editorial material and textual apparatus are well targeted. The editors are keen not to annotate unmercifully, presuming the reader is knowledgeable about familiar classical allusions (or can look them up where necessary) and can consult the Oxford English Dictionary for unfamiliar words. While it is true that a specialist might be just as able to use electronic or print sources to identify particular quotations Haywood might use, it is also true that some of these are less readily available (because of their cost) even to specialists, so the Haywood editors have made a sensible choice to identify those quotations. Christine Blouch's 1996 survey of the critical reception of Haywood's fiction 1906-92 shows the rapid rise since the 1970s in studies, often clearly feminist in nature, by women critics. It is noteworthy how many of those works of Haywood's they discussed were included in the 1996 Eighteenth-Century Fiction database, presumably on the basis of that recent attention. In contrast, this new collection of Haywood's writing, represented by the Selected Works, will make more readily available a much wider range of her work and perhaps, in turn, inspire a new generation of critics, feminist or otherwise... this is a valuable addition to the corpus of Haywood's works and 18th Century writing now available, and members of the editorial team are to be congratulated on their achievement' - Graham Barwell, TEXT Reviews