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Amid the conventional extravagance of this panegyric exist some useful grains of criticism. One of the most clearly expressed and continually reiterated aims of prose fiction, as of other species of writing from time immemorial, was that of conveying to the reader a moral through the agreeable channel of example. This exemplary purpose, inherited by eighteenth century novelists from Cervantes and from the French romances, was asserted again and again in Mrs. Haywood's prefaces, while the last paragraphs of nearly all her tales were used to convey an admonition or to proclaim the value of the story as a "warning to the youth of both sexes." To modern readers these pieces seem less successful illustrations of fiction made didactic, than of didacticism dissolved and quite forgot in fiction, but Sterling and other eulogists strenuously supported the novelist's claim to moral usefulness. The pill of improvement supposed to be swallowed along with the sweets of diversion hardly ever consisted of good precepts and praiseworthy actions, but usually of a warning or a horrible example of what to avoid. As a necessary corollary, the more striking and sensational the picture of guilt, the more efficacious it was likely to prove in the cause of virtue. So in the Preface to "Lasselia" , published to "remind the unthinking Part of the World, how dangerous it is to give way to Passion," the writer hopes that her unexceptionable intent "will excuse the too great Warmth, which may perhaps appear in some particular Pages; for without the Expression being invigorated in some measure proportionate to the Subject, 'twou'd be impossible for a Reader to be sensible how far it touches him, or how probable it is that he is falling into those Inadvertencies which the Examples I relate wou'd caution him to avoid." As a woman, too, Mrs. Haywood was excluded from "Learning's base Monopoly," but not from an intuitive knowledge of the passions, in which respect the sex were, and are, thought the superiors of insensible man. Consequently her chief excellence in the opinion of her readers lay in that power to "command the throbbing Breast and watry Eye" previously recognized by the Volunteer Laureate and her other admirers. She could tell a story in clear and lively, if not always correct and elegant English, and she could describe the ecstasies and agonies of passion in a way that seemed natural and convincing to an audience nurtured on French romans
Mile Douxmourie, once affianced to De L'Amye but jilted by him, accidentally discovers the pair and immediately communicates with the gallant's wife, who with the Valiers soon appears to reclaim the recreants. The wife rages at her husband, he at the perfidious Douxmourie, while Lasselia offers to stab herself.
Summoned back to court by the amorous monarch, Lasselia chooses rather to flee from the protection of her friends in the disguise of a pilgrim, and led by lucky chance casts herself on the protection of her lover, who conveys her to a country inn and there maintains her for some time to their mutual felicity.
No less moving was the appeal of Eliza's fiction to such Biddy Tipkins and Polly Honeycombes as delighted in a tale of amorous adventure, particularly if it was set in the glittering atmosphere of the court. A typical story of intrigues among the great is "Lasselia: or, the Self-Abandoned" .
The first of these is "Idalia: or, the Unfortunate Mistress" , the story of a young Venetian beauty like Lasselia, her charms can only be imagined not described whose varied amorous adventures carry her over most of Italy. She is sought by countless suitors, among them the base Florez, whom her father promptly forbids the house.
The description of Lasselia, for instance, contains no trait that is particular, no characteristic definitely individual. The girl is simply the type of all that is conventionally charming in her sex, "splendidly null, dead perfection."
In the Preface to Lasselia , 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.
When the novels appeared, Idalia was the Unfortunate Mistress, Lasselia the Self-abandon'd. Perhaps because the work outgrew its original proportions, or because short novels found a readier sale, the five were never published under the inclusive cautionary caption. E. Gosse, Gossip in a Library, 161, "What Ann Lang Read." Only one of Mrs.
We have the author's testimony that the three parts "mett a Better Reception then they Deservd," and indeed the piece was extraordinarily successful, running through no less than six separate editions before its inclusion in her collected "Secret Histories, Novels and Poems" in 1725. Second, The Injur'd Husband, or the Mistaken Resentment. Third, Lasselia, or the Unfortunate Mistress.
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