heir doxies. The chivalrous conventions of the heroic romances had
degenerated into the formalities of gallantry, the exalted modesty of
romantic heroines had sunk into a fearful regard for shaky reputations,
and the picture of genteel life was filled with scenes of fraud,
violence, and vice. As the writers of anti-romances in the previous
century had found a delicately malicious pleasure in exhibiting
characters drawn from humble and rustic life performing the ceremonies
and professing the sentiments of a good breeding foreign to their social
position, so the scandal-mongering authors like Mrs. Haywood helped to
make apparent the hollowness of the aristocratic conventions even as
practiced by the aristocracy and the incongruity of applying exalted
ideals derived from an outworn system of chivalry to everyday ladies and
gentleman of the Georgian age. Undoubtedly the writers of _romans a
clef_ did not bargain for this effect, for they clung to their princes
and court ladies till the last, leaving to more able pens the task of
making heroes and heroines out of cobblers and kitchen wenches. But in
representing people of quality as the "vilest and silliest part of the
nation" Mrs. Haywood and her ilk prepared their readers to welcome
characters drawn from their own station in society, and paved the way
for that "confounding of all ranks and making a jest of order," which,
though deplored by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,[1] was nevertheless a
condition of progress toward realism.

Quite apart from the slight merit of her writings, the very fact of Mrs.
Haywood's long career as a woman of letters would entitle her to much
consideration. About the middle of the seventeenth century women
romancers, like women poets, were elegant triflers, content to add the
lustre of wit to their other charms. While Mme de La Fayette was gaining
the plaudits of the urbane world for the _delicatesse_ of "La Princesse
de Cleves" and the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle was employing her
genius upon the fantastic, philosophical "Description of a New World,
called the Blazing World" (1668), women of another stamp were beginning
to write fiction. With the advent of Mme de Villedieu in France and her
more celebrated contemporary, Mrs. Behn, in England, literature became a
profession whereby women could command a livelihood. The pioneer
_romancieres_ were commonly adventuresses in life as in letters, needy
widows like Mrs. Behn, Mme de Gomez, and Mrs. Mary