A Play to Be Read: Authorship as Marriage in Eliza Haywood’s <i>A Wife to Be Lett</i> (1723)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Wife to Be Lett (1723), Eliza Haywood’s first original comedy, is often viewed as a casual early investment in drama more productively reoriented to novel writing. Taking a contrary view, this article shows how this early play is a sophisticated, self-reflective piece in which the author rehearses what became a recurrent motif in her writing: the unique hardships besetting women’s authorship. By drawing attention to the shared predicaments of wives and women writers, Haywood’s play offers a metaphoric figuration of the woman author as a wife, providing a twist to the common trope of the writer as prostitute. A Wife to Be Lett voiced a powerful criticism against the hypocrisy of a society that relied on women (as wives and writers) for the production and circulation of capital but obstructed their efforts to do so. The play’s radical depiction of women as figures of authority and social respectability in the twin markets of marriage and literature sheds light on the moderate success it had on the stage and its far longer afterlife in print.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".