The author of over eighty novels, plays, and volumes of poetry, Eliza Haywood is one of the most prolific and high-profile female authors of the eighteenth century. Her last novel, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, is original for its unsentimental realism in its depiction of marriage and courtship among the leisure classes of the mid-eighteenth century. In his new introduction, editor John Richetti examines how Haywood's amusing and engaging prose explores the subtleties of eighteenth-century courtship. Out of print since the early nineteenth century, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy is now available in an edited and fully annotated modern edition.

In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device—the surrogate family—as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women’s changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe’s and Richardson’s fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope—the model of the hierarchal family—ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.

The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780 offers readers discussions of the entire range of literary expression from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. In essays by thirty distinguished scholars, recent historical perspectives and new critical approaches and methods are brought to bear on the classic authors and texts of the period. Forgotten or neglected authors and themes as well as new and emerging genres within the expanding marketplace for printed matter during the eighteenth century receive special attention and emphasis. The volume's guiding purpose is to examine the social and historical circumstances within which literary production and imaginative writing take place in the period and to evaluate the enduring verbal complexity and cultural insights they articulate so powerfully.