Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Biographical Prolegomenon
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Her Approach to Fame’: 1714–29
- 2 Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia
- 3 Theatrical Thirties: 1729–37
- 4 Adventures of Eovaai
- 5 At the Sign of Fame: 1741–4
- 6 The Female Spectator
- 7 The Parrot
- 8 Epistles for the Ladies
- 9 Was Haywood a Jacobite?
- Epilogue: The Invisible Spy
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Adventures of Eovaai
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Biographical Prolegomenon
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Her Approach to Fame’: 1714–29
- 2 Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia
- 3 Theatrical Thirties: 1729–37
- 4 Adventures of Eovaai
- 5 At the Sign of Fame: 1741–4
- 6 The Female Spectator
- 7 The Parrot
- 8 Epistles for the Ladies
- 9 Was Haywood a Jacobite?
- Epilogue: The Invisible Spy
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The Adventures of Eovaai (1736), a satirical-allegorical-Bolingbrokean-romantical oriental tale, has long been recognized as an effective and at times hilarious attack on Sir Robert Walpole. Recent criticism has admired its wildly hybridized literary qualities including the complex narrative structure, faux scholarly apparatus, generic experimentation and adroit manipulation of the conventions of the oriental tale, and Eovaai seems certain to draw increasing attention. It offers the first sure indication of Haywood's alignment with the Patriot opposition. Up until this point her politics defy easy categorization and it is probably not inaccurate to say that in the 1720s and early 1730s she is not very political, at least in the narrow party politics sense of the word. But beginning in 1736 she will consistently array herself with the Country programme associated with its pre-eminent spokesman, Bolingbroke, against the powerful Court interests associated with Walpole (and, after 1742, his Whig successors); and she will write, how consistently is not clear, in support of the Hanoverian heir, Frederick, the Prince of Wales. The anti-Walpole thrust of the satire is well-known; almost unrecognized is its myth-making on behalf of Frederick, whose proxy in the text, Adelhu, rescues Princess Eovaai in fairy-tale fashion and thereby sets in motion a dénouement in which public virtue is restored to two kingdoms that had fallen into corruption and decline. With its swift and disorienting shifts between utopian and dystopian perspectives, meditations on governance and satiric indictment of a modernity that manifests in private luxury, crazed individualism and unashamed pursuit of self-interest, Eovaai looks back to the great Scriblerian satires of the previous decade and seems indeed closer in spirit to The Dunciad and Gulliver's Travels than to the amatory romances and scandal chronicles with which it is more often compared.
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- Information
- A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood , pp. 73 - 94Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014