The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood
by George Frisbie Whicher

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Title: The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood

Author: George Frisbie Whicher

Release Date: January 31, 2004 [EBook #10889]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE LIFE AND ROMANCES OF

MRS. ELIZA HAYWOOD

BY

GEORGE FRISBIE WHICHER, PH.D.

INSTRUCTOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

1915

_This Monograph has been approved by the Department of English and
Comparative Literature in Columbia University as a contribution to
knowledge worthy of publication._

A. H. THORNDIKE,

_Executive Officer_

PREFACE

The purpose of the following study is not to revive the reputation of a
forgotten author or to suggest that Mrs. Haywood may yet "come into her
own." For the lover of eighteenth century fashions her numerous pages
have indeed a stilted, early Georgian charm, but with the passing of
Ramillies wigs and velveteen small-clothes the popularity of her novels
vanished once for all. She had her world in her time, but that world and
time disappeared with the French Revolution [a]. Now even professed
students of the novel shrink from reading many of her seventy odd
volumes, nor can the infamous celebrity conferred by Pope's attack in
"The Dunciad" save her name from oblivion. But the significance of Mrs.
Haywood's contributions cannot safely be ignored. Her romances of
palpitating passion written between 1720 and 1730 formed a necessary
complement to Defoe's romances of adventure exactly as her Duncan
Campbell pamphlets supplied the one element lacking in his. The domestic
novels of her later life foreshadowed the work of Miss Burney and Miss
Austen, while her career as a woman of letters helped to open a new
profession to her sex. Since even the weakest link in the development of
a literary form is important, I have endeavored to provide future
historians of English fiction with a compact and accurate account of
this pioneer "lady novelist."

Hitherto the most