While under arrest in 1750 on suspicion of producing a seditious pamphlet Eliza Haywood insisted she ‘never wrote any thing in a political way’. This study of her life and works, the first full-length biography in almost a century, views Haywood's life through the prism of her shifting political allegiances. Known today for her novels of sexual passion, Haywood wrote much in the ‘political way’. She exposed ongoing financial corruptions in her early scandal chronicles. By the mid-1730s she had joined the campaign to topple Walpole, attacking him in the blistering Oriental satire Eovaai (1736) and performing on stage in Fielding’s final plays at the Haymarket. She sold anti-ministerial propaganda at her own pamphlet-shop at the 'Sign of Fame' in Covent Garden, wrote a Jacobite weekly paper attacking the Duke of Cumberland and promoted the mid-century cult of the Patriot Prince in the deceptively entitled Epistles to the Ladies (1749–50).
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