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Having Text: Desire and Language in Haywood’s Love in Excess and The Distressed Orphan

In this article, I read two of Eliza Haywood’s popular amatory novels—Love in Excess (1719) and The Distressed Orphan; or, Love in a Mad-House (1726)—in the context of her philosophical poems in order to shed light on the ways in which Haywood re-scripts both conventional seduction narratives and patriarchy’s master narrative. Haywood uses the trope of confinement to reconceptualize the power of language in relation to female desire. She grants epistemological authority to women’s intellect and to passion, and she uses the novel genre to show that illegitimate, feminized passion is as legitimate a way to understand the world as is masculinized reason.