"Anti-Pamela" and "Shamela," and: Fantomina and Other Works, and: The History of Ophelia (review)

Reviewed by: “Anti-Pamela” and “Shamela,”, and: Fantomina and Other Works, and: The History of Ophelia Cameron McFarlane (bio) Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding. “Anti-Pamela” and “Shamela,” ed. Catherine Ingrassia. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004. 336pp. CAN$12.95. ISBN 1-55111-383-X. Eliza Haywood. Fantomina and Other Works, ed. Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004. 283pp. CAN$18.95. ISBN 1-55111-524-7. Sarah Fielding. The History of Ophelia, ed. Peter Sabor. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004. 320pp. CAN$18.95. ISBN 1-55111-120-9. Broadview Press continues to expand its catalogue of editions primarily for use in undergraduate classrooms. Fresh critical introductions, interesting appendices of contextual material, and useful footnotes—which, unlike endnotes, stand a chance of actually being read—make these editions deservedly popular with both instructors and students. The recent offerings considered here— Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias's Fantomina and Other Works by Eliza Haywood; Peter Sabor's The History of Ophelia by Sarah Fielding; and Catherine Ingrassia's Anti-Pamela by Eliza Haywood and Shamela by Henry Fielding—attest to Broadview's ongoing commitment to produce affordable scholarly editions of works that have either languished in obscurity or been available only in expensive and non-annotated photo-reprints, as well as to present more familiar works in new and interesting contexts. "When eighteenth-century readers thought about the novel," begins Croskery and Patchias's introduction to Fantomina and Other Works, "many of them probably thought first of one writer in particular—Eliza Haywood" (9). Ten or so years ago, this would have seemed a daring opening gambit, but Haywood's critical fortunes have risen considerably in the past decade, thanks in part to editions of her works like this one. The question of Haywood's disappearance from and remarkable restoration to literary history is [End Page 554] one that Croskery and Patchias take up in their introduction, citing Haywood's "generic heterogeneity" (26) as a point of connection between eighteenth-century interest in the miscellany and our own present fondness for hybrid forms. "Far from exploiting the same formula over and over again, as some of her detractors have charged," they write, Haywood's works explore "the complexities of seduction, of love, and of passion, outside any single conventional paradigm" (32). Students will appreciate the introductory discussions of Haywood's life and career and, particularly, of eighteenth-century attacks on the novel as a dangerous, corrupting form of literature; the latter discussion could provide the context for an interesting and lively class debate on Fantomina and its possible "effects." Fantomina (1725), with its memorably determined and resourceful heroine and the laughably unaware Beauplaisir, is clearly the selling point here. But Fantomina comprises only thirty pages of this 283-page work. The "other works"—The Tea-Table (1725), Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), and Love-Letters on All Occasions (1730)—while interesting, are unlikely to "go over" in an undergraduate classroom, and, to some extent, they read like the kind of context usually found in appendices. These works will interest students in senior seminars and graduate classes as well as scholars, but such readers may find excessive the glossing that is clearly geared towards inexperienced readers in introductory courses (within ten pages [47–56], we find the following glosses: "ardent": passionate; "Ardour": passion; "Ardency": passion). What will the student who requires this level of glossing make of the discussion of "generic heterogeneity" in the introduction? Nonetheless, one is grateful for this carefully prepared addition to the range of Haywood texts now available (note a typo in the introduction: Charles II did not die in 1665 [18]). Peter Sabor's The History of Ophelia (1760) is the first modern edition of Sarah Fielding's last novel. Presented by "The Author of DAVID SIMPLE" as a set of "Papers" found in "an old Buroe" (37), The History of Ophelia is narrated, or rather "written," by the heroine herself at the request of a correspondent named only as "Your Ladyship." Ophelia tells of her secluded childhood in Wales, her abduction by the rakish Lord Dorchester, her introduction into London society, her imprisonment...

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