Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Play of Fiction: Novels and the Theater, Haywood to Austen

Abstract

This study looks at developments in eighteenth-century drama that influenced rise of novel; it begins by asking why women writers of this period experimented so frequently with both novels and plays. Here, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen explore theatrical frames--from playhouse, to social conventions of masquerade, to fictional frame of novel itself—that encourage audiences to dismiss what they contain as feigned. Yet such frames also, as a result, create a safe space for self-expression. These authors explore such payoffs both within their work—through descriptions of heroines who disguise themselves to express themselves—and through it. Reading act of authorship as itself a form of performance, Anderson contextualizes convention of fictionality that accompanied development of novel; she notes that as novel, like theater of earlier eighteenth century, came to highlight its fabricated nature, authors could use it as a covert yet cathartic space. Fiction for these authors, like theatrical performance for actor, thus functions as an act of both disclosure and disguise—or finally presents self-expression as ability to oscillate between two, in the play of fiction.

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