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Haywood's novels, written in a tawdry style, now utterly exploded; the romances of these days being reduced much nearer the standard of nature, and to the manners of the living world." Realism is, indeed, far to seek in the brief but intricate tissue of incidents that made the novel of 1728.
And in "The Disguis'd Prince: or, the Beautiful Parisian" she translated the melting history of a prince who weds a merchant's daughter in spite of complicated difficulties. Much reading in books of this sort filled Mrs. Haywood's mind with images of exalted virtue and tremendous vice, and like a Female Quixote, she saw and reported the life about her in terms borrowed from the romances.
This bit of libel meant no more than that Mrs. Haywood's relations with Savage and other minor writers had been injudiciously unconventional. As for the booksellers, Curll had not been professionally connected with the authoress before the publication of "The Dunciad," and the part he played in the games may be regarded as due entirely to Pope's malice.
The department of sensationalism especially exploited by women writers and generally allowed to be most suited to their genius is sufficiently indicated by the words typographically emphasized on the title-page of one of Mrs. Haywood's few essays. "Reflections on the Various Effects of LOVE, According to the contrary Dispositions of the Persons on whom it operates.
As a matter of fact Mrs. Haywood's most successful and popular writings were produced after the publication of that poem, and that too at a period when Pope's predominance was far higher than it was at the time the satire itself appeared." A. Esdaile, English Tales and Romances, Introduction, xxviii. Philobillon Soc. Misc., IV, 12.
The three surviving couples marry at once, and this time the husbands "continue, with their fair Wives, great and lovely Examples of conjugal Affection." Such, with the omission of all secondary narratives, is the main plot of Eliza Haywood's first novel.
Haywood's "Love in Excess" also inherited many traits from the debased but glittering Sir Fopling Flutters, Mirabells, Millamants, and Lady Wishforts of the Restoration stage. Of character drawing, indeed, there is practically none in the entire piece; the personages are distinguished only by the degree of their willingness to yield to the tender passion.
Haywood's early fiction move in an imaginary world, sometimes, it is true, marked with the names of real places, but no more truly realistic than the setting of "Arcadia" or "Parthenissa." Nor are the figures that people the eighteenth century paradise of romance more definitely pictured than the landscape.
The success of her precaution is evident in the scantiness of our information about her. The few details recorded in the "Biographia Dramatica" can be amplified only by a tissue of probabilities. Consequently Mrs. Haywood's one resemblance to Shakespeare is the obscurity that covers the events of her life.
Griffith, Collection of Novels , II, 159, prefers 1759. The two novels were Clementina , a revision of The Agreeable Caledonian, and The History of Leonora Meadowson . 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.
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