A study of the claims that eighteenth century author, Eliza Haywood, wrote her novel “The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless” as a means of promoting social reforms.
The paper describes the life of Eliza Haywood, an eighteenth century English author whose literary works were considered scandalous for the times she lived in in. The paper examines Haywood’s novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. It shows that modern scholarship elevates this novel as Haywood’s most successful and most influential work. The paper examines how Eliza Haywood so successfully managed to meet her contemporaries in using the new genre of the novel to elicit reform, especially the reforms of women’s educational standards and the position of women in marriage and family life.
There is no shame to be found in the propriety with which Haywood’s evolution as an author took her, as those were the true restrictions experienced by women of her class and of her time. The early challenges and the heated controversy that were elicited by her early works may have left her in a historical position of obscurity but they prove she was making an attempt to alter a system that left female authors unrecognized outside of infamy. Looking back at her works and the biographical information available for her leaves a modern literary historian happily intrigued by her narrative and her life and there is nothing like a mystery to engage modern thought on historical evolution in literature or life.