Sizing Up the Patriarchy

Numerous feminist disciplines have shown that the interests of women in a patriarchal society are rarely taken into account. The traditional view of history, for example, is that it is the story of great political events; by contrast, feminist historians have tried to uncover evidence of women in this chronicle of great events and looked into the circumstances of women's lives through the centuries. Now "everyday life" is becoming a more prominent concern of mainstream historians as well. The situation in the history of the novel is quite different, however. Several women authors at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century made important contributions to the development of the English novel, and the genre has always shown a concern for and an interest in domestic arrangements. As opposed to history, the protagonists of the novel have been women as often as they have been men and the story of the woman trapped in social constraints became a particularly novelistic subject. One of the most prolific women writers of the eighteenth century, Eliza Haywood was a key player in the history of the English novel. Haywood came to fame in 1719 with the publication of her first novel, Love in Excess. In this nove

. . .