Love in the Time of Finance: Eliza Haywood and the Rise of the Scenic Novel

Abstract

In literature, scenes orient readers, structuring their experience of the fiction, focusing their desires and providing an identifiable location for specific events and exchanges (‘that scene where…’). They play an equally important structuring role for the writer, too. As Leigh Michaels explains in On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells (2007), ‘writing a book doesn’t look like such an overwhelming project if you think of the task in terms of constructing the individual scenes that make up the story—each one just a few pages in length’ (p. 108). But when did scenes become a fundamental structuring principle for the novel? The genre of popular romance is in fact important here: ..