SOURCE: "Descending Angels," in Fetter'd of Free?: British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, Ohio University Press, 1986, pp. 186-200.

In the following essay, Schofield analyzes Haywood's depiction of prostitutes in her fiction.

In 1731 Sarah Millwood, London prostitute, protests:

I curse your barbarous sex, who robb'd me of [my virtues] e'er I knew their worth; then left me, too late, to count their value by their loss. Another and another Spoiler came, and all my gain was poverty and reproach.¹

She expresses the feminine concern of the eighteenth century: the wholesale takeover of the female self by the male machine. But Sarah's plea is not a solitary one, nor was the whore a voiceless victim. Notables such as Jonathan Swift and Bernard Mandeville in Essay upon Projects (1707) and A Modest Defence of the Public Stews (1724) respectively had taken on the cause of the common...