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Eliza Haywood And The Narratological Tropes Of Secret History, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

Eliza Haywood’s novels and political writings are often considered in isolation from each other; however, there is a discursive thread that links her fictional and political works: her engagement with secret history. Across her career, in her novels as well as her political pamphlets and periodicals, Haywood deploys two important narratological tropes of the secret historian: the tendency to reveal the secrets of public figures while concealing the author’s own political position and the tendency to muse self-reflexively about the author’s own role as a writer of history. Haywood’s facility in deploying these dual narratological devices of concealment and confession …