Among the many writers presented as hacks and dunces in Alexander Pope's Dunciad, Eliza Haywood (c.1693–1756), has the dubious privilege of being one of only five women writers who appear in all the versions Pope wrote and revised between 1728 and 1743.She stands at the centre of a circle on display as a prize in a competition between two publishers to see who can urinate the greatest distance. This scene – of a woman competed for by two men to ‘own’ her – is designed by Pope as a slur on a woman writer he charged with ‘profligate licentiousness’ in the production of ‘libellous Memoirs and Novels’ that ‘reveal the faults and misfortunes of both sexes, to the ruin and disturbance, of publick fame or private happiness’. It takes the form of an act of counter-shaming, putting the writer who has shamed others on display. But it also suggests a woman taken in adultery, ‘confess’d’ before her ‘works’ as a sinner is required to do: the products of her shame two ‘babes of love’ or illegitimate children.

In fact, no children appear in the engraving to which Pope appears to be referring, nor pearls. There is a flower in the hair of the woman portrayed in head and shoulders who is looking directly from a circular frame at her readers, her dress loose and low cut. This engraving of Eliza Haywood was apparently printed as a frontispiece to the new (fifth) edition of Haywood’s first novel, Love in Excess (1719–20), in 1724 and was not in fact by Elisha Kirkall as the note in the Dunciad asserts, but by George Vertue from a portrait by Jacques Parmentier. In the next two years, it appeared also as a frontispiece to two multi-volume collections of works, because apparently bound in with the fifth edition of Love in Excess to make the first volume of each.