ckened some twelve years before in a licentious volume
called "Memoirs of a Certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of
Utopia."[11] Had her Grace been aware that the reputed author of that
comprehensive lampoon was none other than the woman who now outdid
herself in praise, Eliza Haywood would probably have profited little by
her panegyric. For though the "Memoirs of a Certain Island" like the
"Adventures of Eovaai" made a pretence of being translated into English
from the work of a celebrated Utopian author, the British public found
no difficulty in attributing it by popular acclaim to Mrs. Haywood, and
she reaped immense notoriety from it. In prefaces to some of her
subsequent works she complained of the readiness of the world to pick
meanings in whatever was published by a struggling woman, or protested
that she had no persons or families in view in writing her stories, but
she never disclaimed the authorship of this production. Undoubtedly the
world was right in "smoking" the writer.[12]

If before she had retailed secret histories of late amours singly, Mrs.
Haywood dealt in them now by the wholesale, and any reader curious to
know the identity of the personages hidden under such fictitious names
as Romanus, Beaujune, Orainos, Davilla, Flirtillaria, or Saloida could
obtain the information by consulting a convenient "key" affixed to each
of the two volumes. In this respect, as in the general scheme of her
work, Mrs. Haywood was following the model set by the celebrated Mrs.
Manley in her "New Atalantis." She in turn had derived her method from
the French _romans a clef_ or romances in which contemporary scandal was
reported in a fictitious disguise. The imitation written by Mrs. Haywood
became only less notorious than her original, and was still well enough
known in 1760 to be included in the convenient list of novels prefixed
to the elder Colman's "Polly Honeycombe." It consists of a tissue of
anecdotes which, if retold, would (in Fuller's words) "stain through the
cleanest language I can wrap them in," all set in an allegorical
framework of a commonplace kind.

A noble youth arrives upon the shores of a happy island [England], where
he encounters the God of Love, who conveys him to a spacious court in
the midst of the city. There Pecunia and Fortuna, served by their high
priest Lucitario [J. Craggs, the elder] preside over an Enchanted Well
[South Sea Company] while all degrees of humanity stand about in
expectati