The Review of English Studies Advance Access originally published online on October 25, 2007
The Review of English Studies 2008 59(242):722-739; doi:10.1093/res/hgm110
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved
Eliza Haywood, Savage Love, and Biographical Uncertainty
University of Montevallo
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Abstract |
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The surmise that Eliza Haywood (1693?–1756) was the cast-off mistress of Richard Savage and mother of one (or two) bastard children by him is generally accepted by Haywood scholars. This speculation is, however, almost groundless; it grows out of a misunderstanding of the dynamics of the circle that gathered around Aaron Hill in the early 1720s. Coterie verse and satire produced by Savage, Haywood, Hill, and Martha Fowke Sansom suggest that it was not Savage but Hill who was the focus of erotic interest in the circle, and that Haywood was furious with both Sansom and Savage for their role in alienating the affections of Hill, whom she regarded as a mentor and collaborator in a poetry of the sublime. Too much of the Haywood biography as now understood is deformed by undue respect for the veracity of sexualising lampoons by the likes of Savage and Pope as well as the tendency to cast her as one of her own seduced and abandoned heroines.
Research for this essay was supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society. My thanks to Norma Clarke, Christine Gerrard, and especially Thomas Lockwood for their responses to earlier versions of this essay.