The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood. George Frisbie Whicher

Ann Lang Read." Only one of Mrs. Haywood's novels, The City Jilt, was ever issued in cheap form. T. Bailey, the printer, evidently combined his printing business with the selling of patent medicines.

      [21] The latter may be read in Savage's Poems, Cooke's edition, II, 162. The complimentary verses first printed before the original issue.

      [22] His poem To Mrs. Eliza Haywood on her Writings was hastily inserted in the fourth volume of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems when that collection had reached its third edition (1732). In the fourth edition of ten years later it stands, with the verses already described, at the beginning of Volume I.

      [23] In the Preface to Lasselia (1723), for instance, she feels obliged to defend herself from "that Aspersion which some of my own Sex have been unkind enough to throw upon me, that I seem to endeavour to divert more than to improve the Minds of my Readers. Now, as I take it, the Aim of every Person, who pretends to write (tho' in the most insignificant and ludicrous way) ought to tend at least to a good Moral Use; I shou'd be sorry to have my Intentions judg'd to be the very reverse of what they are in reality. How far I have been able to succeed in my Desires of infusing those Cautions, too necessary to a Number, I will not pretend to determine; but where I have had the Misfortune to fail, must impute it either to the Obstinacy of those I wou'd persuade, or to my own Deficiency in that very Thing which they are pleased to say I too much abound in—a true description of Nature."

      [24] An eight page verse satire entitled The Female Dunces. Inscribed to Mr. Pope (1733) after criticizing the conduct of certain well known ladies, concludes with praise of a nymph who we may believe was intended to represent Eliza Haywood:

      "Eliza good Examples shews in vain,

       Despis'd, and laugh'd at by the vicious Train; So bright she shines, she might adorn a Throne Not with a borrow'd Lustre, but her Own."

      [25] A single exception was The Surprise (1724), dedicated to Steele in the following words: "The little History I presume to offer, being composed of Characters full of Honour and Generosity, I thought I had a fit Opportunity, by presenting it to one who has made it so much his Study to infuse those Principles, and whose every Action is a shining Example of them, to express my Zeal in declaring myself with all imaginable Regard," etc., etc.

      [26] See the Dedication to The Fatal Secret (1724). "But as I am a Woman, and consequently depriv'd of those Advantages of Education which the other Sex enjoy, I cannot so far flatter my Desires, as to imagine it in my Power to soar to any Subject higher than that which Nature is not negligent to teach us. "Love is a Topick which I believe few are ignorant of; there requires no Aids of Learning, no general Conversation, no Application; a shady Grove and purling Stream are all Things that's necessary to give us an Idea of the tender Passion. This is a Theme, therefore, which, while I make choice to write of, frees me from the Imputation of vain or self-sufficient:—None can tax me with having too great an Opinion of my own Genius, when I aim at nothing but what the meanest may perform. "I have nothing to value myself on, but a tolerable Share of Discernment."

      [27] See the Preface to The Injur'd Husband quoted in Chap. IV.

      [28] Preface to The Memoirs of the Baron de Brosse (1725). A similar complaint had appeared in the Dedication of The Fair Captive (1721). "For my own part … I suffer'd all that Apprehension could inflict, and found I wanted many more Arguments than the little Philosophy I am Mistress of could furnish me with, to enable me to stem that Tide of Raillery, which all of my Sex, unless they are very excellent indeed, must expect, when once they exchange the Needle for the Quill."

      [29] See a poem by Aaron Hill, To Eliza upon her design'd Voyage into Spain (undated), Hill's Works, III, 363. Also The Husband, 59. "On a trip I was once taking to France, an accident happen'd to detain me for some days at Dover," etc. Mrs. Haywood's relations with Hill have been excellently discussed by Miss Dorothy Brewster, Aaron Hill (1913), 186.

      [30] The first of these was a translation of the Chevalier de Mouhy's best known work, La Mouche, ou les Aventures et espiègleries facétieuses de Bigand, (1730), and may have been done by Mrs. Haywood herself. The second title certainly savors of a typical Haywoodian production, but I have been unable to find a copy of these alleged publications. Neither of them was originally published at the Sign of Fame, and they could hardly have been pirated, since Cogan, who issued the volume wherein the advertisement appeared, was also the original publisher of The Busy-Body. The Anti-Pamela had already been advertised for Huggonson in June, 1741, and had played a small part in the series of pamphlets, novels, plays, and poems excited by Richardson's fashionable history. If Mrs. Haywood wrote it, she was biting the hand that fed her, for The Virtuous Villager probably owed its second translation and what little sale it may have enjoyed to the similarity between the victorious virgin and the popular Pamela.

      [31] B.M. (MSS. Sloane. 4059. ff. 144), undated.

      [32] Monthly Review, II, 167, Jan. 1750.

      [33] The Biographia Dramatica gives this date. Clara Reeve, Progress of Romance, I, 121, however, gives 1758, while Mrs. Griffith, Collection of Novels (1777), II, 159, prefers 1759. The two novels were Clementina (1768), a revision of The Agreeable Caledonian, and The History of Leonora Meadowson (1788).

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      SHORT ROMANCES OF PASSION

      The little amatory tales which formed Mrs. Haywood's chief stock in trade when she first set up for a writer of fiction, inherited many of the characteristics of the long-winded French romances. Though some were told with as much directness as any of the intercalated narratives in "Clélie" or "Cléopâtre," others permitted the inclusion of numerous "little histories" only loosely connected with the main plot. Letters burning with love or jealousy were inserted upon the slightest provocation, and indeed remained an important component of Eliza Haywood's writing, whether the ostensible form was romance, essay, or novel. Scraps of poetry, too, were sometimes used to ornament her earliest effusions, but the other miscellaneous features of the romances—lists of maxims, oratory, moral discourses, and conversations—were discarded from the first. The language of these short romances, while generally more easy and often more colloquial than the absurd extravagances of the translators of heroic romances and their imitators, still smacked too frequently of shady groves and purling streams to be natural. Many conventional themes of love or jealousy, together with such stock types as the amorous Oriental potentate, the lover disguised as a slave, the female page, the heroine of excessive delicacy, the languishing beauty, the ravishing sea-captain, and the convenient pirate persisted in the pages of Mrs. Barker, Mrs. Haywood, and Mrs. Aubin. As in the interminable tomes of Scudéry, love and honor supplied the place of life and manners in the tales of her female successors, and though in some respects their stories were nearer the standard of real conduct, new novel on the whole was but old romance writ small.

      In attempting to revitalize the materials and methods of the romances Mrs. Haywood was but following the lead of the French romancières, who had successfully invaded the field of prose fiction when the passing of the précieuse fashion and Boileau's influential ridicule[1] had discredited the romance in the eyes of writers with classical predilections. Mme. de La Fayette far outshines her rivals, but a host of obscure women, headed by Hortense Desjardins, better known as Mme. de Villedieu, hastened to supply the popular demand for romantic stories. In drawing their subjects from the histories of more modern courts than those of Rome, Greece, or Egypt they endeavored to make their "historical" romances of passion more lifelike than the heroic romances, and while they avoided the extravagances, they also shunned the voluminousness of the romans à longue haleine. So the stories related in "La Belle Assemblée" by Mme. de Gomez, translated by Mrs. Haywood in 1725 and often reprinted, are nearer the model of Boccaccio's novelle than of the Scudéry romance, both in their directness and in being set in a framework, but the inclusion, in the framework, of long conversations on love,