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To a taste accustomed to "Sir Charles Grandison," and "Peregrine Pickle," and "The Sentimental Journey" the rehash of Eliza Haywood's novel must have seemed very far even from the manners of the world of fiction. The judgment of the "Critical Review" was still more savage in its accuracy.
Cloud to await her husband's return. There the story ends in an unexpected tragedy of incest and blood. The back-stairs intrigues and the sensational horrors which to the majority of Mrs. Haywood's readers doubtless seemed the chief attraction of the story are not different from the melodramatic features of countless other amatory tales, French and English.
They are generally unindividualized, lay figures swayed by the passions of the moment, or at best mere "humour" characters representing love's epitome, extravagant jealousy, or eternal constancy. Pope could make a portrait specific by the vigorous use of epigrams, but Mrs. Haywood's comments on her heroes and heroines are but feeble.
On the night of March 17th, General McCown left for Fort Pillow with the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Colonel Kennedy's Louisiana, Fourth, Fifth, and Thirty-first Tennessee, Bankhead's and six guns of Captain R.C. Stewart's batteries, and Neely's and Haywood's cavalry, leaving at Madrid Bend the First Alabama, Eleventh and Twelfth Arkansas, and Terry's Arkansas Battalion, three Tennessee regiments, commanded respectively by Colonels Brown, Clark, and Henderson, Colonel Baker's regiment of twelve companies called the Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi regiment, five guns of Captain Stewart's field-battery, and Captain Hudson's and Captain Wheeler's cavalry.
Manley, Mrs. Haywood, and later Fielding and Mrs. Lennox were successful in both fields. The women writers especially were familiar with dramatic technique both as actors and playwrights, and turned their stage training to account when they wrote prose fiction. Mrs. Haywood's first novel, "Love in Excess" , showed evidences of her apprenticeship to the theatre.
"Me and him was over in Haywood's pasture when dad come along with the squire in his wagon. Well, they made Phil get in, and that's all of it, except I promised I'd come and tell your folks, so you needn't get scared or nothin' when he didn't come back to-night." "He will come back to-night," said Frank. "He won't stay in the poorhouse." "Yes, he will. He can't help himself.
So at the maturity of her powers she lacked a vessel worthy of holding the stores of her experience, and first and last she never exceeded the permutations of sensationalism possible in the short amatory romance. Long after Mrs. Haywood's death in 1756 came out the last novel presumably of her composing.
I have not seen the book. Ascribed to Mrs. Haywood in the advertisements of her additional Works, 1727. The B.M. copy, catalogued under "Ariel," contains only a fragment of 24 pages. Miss M.P. Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century , passim. The "key" is almost the sole contribution to Mrs. Haywood's bibliography in Bohn's Lowndes.
Gosse calls her for amusement or for admonition, but the student of the period may find that Eliza Haywood's seventy or more books throw an interesting sidelight upon public taste and the state of prose fiction at a time when the half created novel was still "pawing to get free his hinder parts." E. Bernbaum, Mrs. Behn's Biography a Fiction, PMLA, XXVIII, 432.
Thus completely metamorphosed were the heroines of Mrs. Haywood's maturest fiction. Betsy Thoughtless is not even the innocent, lovely, and pliable girl typified in Fielding's Sophia Western. She is eminently hard-headed, inquisitive, and practical, and is justly described by Sir Walter Raleigh as "own cousin to Roderick Random."
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