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Eliza Haywood
(ca. 1693-1756)

Eliza Haywood refused to let eighteenth-century Britain’s leading periodical, The Spectator, forget women authors.

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Eliza Haywood (ca. 1693–1756)
The Female Spectator. London: T. Gardner, 1744.

Already an actress, novelist, and educator, Haywood created the first English language magazine for women in 1744. Volume 1 of The Female Spectator opened with this frontispiece, featuring the four fictional women authors that Haywood fabricated to represent and speak to readers of all ages. Statues of the Greek female poet Sappho and the classicist Madam D’Acier observe as these eighteenth-century women follow in their predecessors’ footsteps.

EC7.H3362.746f. Gift of Donald and Mary Hyde, 1961.

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