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Product Description
Book Description
Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was on of the most successful writers of her time; indeed, the two most popular English novels in the early eighteenth-century were Robinson Crusoe and Haywood’s first novel, Love in Excess. As this edition enables modern readers to discover, its enormous success is easy to understand. Love in Excess is a well crafted novel in which the claims of love and ambition are pursued through multiple storylines until the heroine engineers a melodramatic conclusion.
Haywood's frankness about female sexuality may explain the later neglect of Love in Excess. (In contrast, her accomplished domestic novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, has remained available.) Love in Excess and its reception provide a lively and valuable record of the challenge that female desire posed to social decorum.
For the second Broadview edition, the appendix of eighteenth-century responses to Haywood has been considerably expanded.
About the Author
David Oakleaf teaches in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. He specializes in fiction, from Eliza Haywood and Jonathan Swift to Laurence Sterne and Frances Burney.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you like Jane Austen, you'll really like Love In Excess. It is both a humorous and exciting tale of loves lost, gained, regained, and unconsummated. The diversity of characters really makes this book intriguing. You never know who will do or say what , and if you think you do, you'll be wrong. What will be surprising to readers of Austen or Burney is the amount of control the female characters have over their own fate. In a Burney novel, for example, events tend to happen to the female characters rather than the character shaping the events. This isn't the case with Love In Excess. The women in this novel are very much active in their own circumstances, whether for good or ill. Love in Excess deserves your attention. In the first half of the eighteenth century the only novel to out sell it was Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which suggests to me that scholars should give it more attention for its importance in the development of the English novel. Regardless, scholarly reader or escapist will enjoy this book.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
35 of 39 people found the following review helpful
One of the Best Novels of the 18th (or any) century
10 Mar 1999
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
If you like Jane Austen, you'll really like Love In Excess. It is both a humorous and exciting tale of loves lost, gained, regained, and unconsummated. The diversity of characters really makes this book intriguing. You never know who will do or say what , and if you think you do, you'll be wrong. What will be surprising to readers of Austen or Burney is the amount of control the female characters have over their own fate. In a Burney novel, for example, events tend to happen to the female characters rather than the character shaping the events. This isn't the case with Love In Excess. The women in this novel are very much active in their own circumstances, whether for good or ill. Love in Excess deserves your attention. In the first half of the eighteenth century the only novel to out sell it was Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which suggests to me that scholars should give it more attention for its importance in the development of the English novel. Regardless, scholarly reader or escapist will enjoy this book.
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful
The first novelist & very much misunderstood
5 Nov 2003
Format:Paperback
It's a shame that Richardson gets credit for being the first novelist--Haywood wrote "Love in Excess" twenty years prior to "Pamela"!!! And frankly, I think "Love in Excess" is not only a much better novel in terms of its craft and general use of language, it is also much more entertaining--which was the aim of many early novels anyway.
"Love in Excess" is a bawdy, surprisingly complex romp. What you have, I think, are morally ambiguous characters; some are just flat-out amoral; and the fun and playful thing about EH is that she treats her characters as consistent, moral creatures, yet they are far from it. Indeed, for those that read EH as simply a romance writer, they're missing out on a wealth of sarcasm, satire, and humor. EH knew she was creating despicable people; she wanted to point out the absurdities of courtly love; and by writing in a tone that is seemingly serious, she is also testing her audience. Even though this was the first novel, Haywood understood how to write both to the masses and to her peers. In other words, "Love in Excess" is multi-functional and sets a standard for those like Richardson to follow--who, hypocritically, I'd imagine, would deny her influence and dismiss her talents because of her gender. It's wild that Haywood is hardly known: she's a master writer, a brilliant social commentator, and in possession of a tremendous analytical mind. I admire her very much.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Not for Austen fans necessarily, but a good read
6 May 2000
Format:Paperback
Austen fans would be advised to read Haywood's History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, not Love in Excess, which is a much earlier "novel" following the fortunes of a male protagonist through a series of increasingly bizarre romantic twists and tangles. It's a fast read and quite enjoyable, but be prepared for some serious nuttiness.
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