A student who took my Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature class last year thanked me for helping her to find her voice by giving me a gift: an Eliza Haywood mug with images and a quote from The Female Spectator. Like many students, she loved Haywood and continued to reference her work long after the class had ended; indeed, during the fol- lowing semester, she suggested to her Shakespeare professor that he revise his syllabus to include Haywood as an anachronistic riposte to the patriar- chal oppression she saw in Shakespeare's plays. My student's intertextual ges- tures—the gift of Haywood's words repurposed and given back—and the suggestion to include Haywood's words as a feminist talking back to the male literary canon are wonderful and apt. Haywood's texts resonate with contemporary students: the heroines are smart young women whose under- standing of patriarchy develops alongside their need to navigate its restric- tions; the figuration of sex as power is hashtag relevant; and the plot lines are lascivious, transgressive, often melodramatic, and brief. I am not surprised that Haywood is engaging and teachable; rather, I am surprised by the pau- city of Haywood adaptations.

Eliza Haywood (1693?–1756) was one of the most popular writers in her time. She was a prolific and nimble writer who published dozens of novels, plays, poems, and periodicals, including one written specifically for a female audience. As one of the first professional woman writers, and one known best for her scandal fiction, Haywood herself was often the subject of scan- dal and the object of male literary vitriol and derision. While Haywood's work has entered our literary canon, the afterlives for Haywood's heroines have been limited. This chapter takes up several exciting adaptations of Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze (1725) and of The Distress’d Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse (1726), novels about how to read and manipulate behavior, identity, and social conventions. Both narratives condemn the institutional- ization and normalization of patriarchal controls over women's bodies and fortunes.