Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess: Women, the Enlightenment, and the Trap of Reason

Abstract

This paper examines the contribution of Eliza Haywood’s first work of amatory fiction, Love in Excess; or the Fatal Enquiry, to the tradition of women’s critical writing that have questioned the hidden exclusions at the core of the European Enlightenment. Love in Excess addresses the dichotomy of reason versus emotion and the paradoxical expectations it imposed upon upper-class women during the European Enlightenment. Haywood’s exploration challenges this binary construction by showing the mutual interdependence of reason and passion, and by exposing the double standards on the basis of which women’s and men’s desires were regulated.