Haywood was born Eliza Fowler c. 1693. She was likely married between 1714-1719. She "describe[d] her marriage as 'unfortunate' and cites it as the reason that she was forded to ear her living by her pen" (Croskery 10). In any case she appeared as Eliza Haywood in London in 1714 (ODNB). She had two illegitimate children, which Pope discussed in his The Dunciad, and were likely fathered by both Richard Savage, a poet and William Hatchett, a playwright. She is now known as one of the most important founders of the English novel.
Little is known about her life, which is possibly the result o a request on her death bed to "a particular Person, who was well aquainted with all the Particulars of it, not to communicate to any one the least circumstance relating to her"(Ballaster 159).
Eliza Haywood is said to have been "a craft, cunning manipulator of the literary marketplace" (Ingrassia, Texts,Lies), as she created many different types of literature throughout her lifetime and her "rate of publication suggests she was enormously popular"(Ingrassia, "Introduction" 31). She produced over 40 works of fiction, four translations, a biography, multiple plays, a history of the stage, seven periodicals, numerous poems and pamphlets and two collected editions of her works (Fowler 1), proving to be extremely versatile.Her most well known fiction is her scandal or amatory fiction which was mainly written in the 1720's. In her later years she began writing the more popular "fictionalized sermons [which] grew out of the popularity of conduct books and moral guides"(Schofield 7).
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