Episode 27: Fantomina

Eliza Haywood doesn’t get read much today outside of eighteenth-century lit classes, which is a shame because she’s 1) as important to the English novel as Defoe or Fielding and 2) great and weird in all all the right ways. We’re discussing Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725), a novella all about feminine desire and agency, subjecthood, and Enlightenment discourses of “identity.” (That is, how do you know that you’re a distinct, legible person in the world? Maybe you don’t! Maybe you change your dress and hair a little, and how could we even tell you’re you???) It’s amatory fiction, a genre known at the time for its horniness, but Fantomina shows how the amatory takes on important -- and troubling -- questions around consent and rape.

We read the Broadview edition edited by Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias. For more on Fantomina, see Croskery’s essay “Masquing Desire: The Politics of Passion in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work. And for more on Haywood and economic discourses, see our good friend David Diamond’s piece, “Eros and Exchange Alley: Speculative Desire in Eliza Haywood’s Memoirs of a Certain Island” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

*Note to our listeners. Megan is on maternity leave. She’ll be back on the show in a couple weeks.

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