On Girten, Kristin. “Unsexed Souls: Natural Philosophy as Transformation in Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator Author(s).” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 55-74.

Girten explores Female Spectator issues in which Haywood recommends the practice of natural philosophy for women, purportedly inspired by letters from a Female Spectator reader she calls “Philo-Naturae.” (Scholars are not certain whether letters by Philo-Naturae were composed by a reader or Haywood herself.) Only recently (as of 2009) has the Female Spectator garnered the attention of scholars, even though it was her most popular work during her lifetime, and previously, scholars understood it as Haywood’s “testament to her shift away from the audacity that distinguished her earlier writings, toward a more sober didacticism allegedly characteristic of her later years as a writer” (56). Girten counters that assumption, participating in the new(er) critical framework to reveal the Female Spectator as subtly provocative. While “other texts by women from the same period are even more overt in their challenge to gender disparity” (70), Haywood’s could be (my interpretation) construed as more persuasive in a different, perhaps more politically savvy/sensitive, way. Advocating for natural philosophy was one of the ways that the Female Spectator engaged in political agitation. “Two key characteristics of England’s new science” justify this: (1) natural philosophy’s “propensity to transform small, mundane, and mean objects into things to be admired,” (2) “its close association with the Christian tradition of meditation. … The status of their souls therefore entitles women to be perceived as men’s peers in both contexts” (emphasis mine) (57). Later in the century, 1786, the first female philosopher was recognized by the British Royal Society: Caroline Herschel, whose discovery Frances Burney termed “the first lady’s comet” (60), which provides useful historical context for my critical edition/introduction. Along with A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood, and Fair Philosopher, this essay posits a persona of Haywood as political and philosophical, wisely navigating the circumstances afforded her as one of the few, and the most prolific (in terms of genre), women writers in this period.