ong been serving him secretly in the capacity of chambermaid.
Fidelio reveals her identity and dies of hopeless love, pitied by all.
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.

"Love in Excess" best illustrates the similarity of sensational fiction
to clap-trap drama, but others of her early works bear traces of the
author's familiarity with the theatre. The escape of the pair of lovers
from an Oriental court, already the theme of countless plays including
Mrs. Haywood 's own "Pair Captive," was re-vamped to supply an episode
in "Idalia" (1723), and parts of the same novel are written in concealed
blank verse that echoes the heroic Orientalism of some of Dryden's
tragedies. In the character of Grubguard, the amorous alderman of "The
City Jilt" (1726), Mrs. Haywood apparently had in mind not Alderman
Barber, whom the character little resembles, but rather Antonio in
Otway's "Venice Preserved." And the plot of "The Distressed Orphan, or
Love in a Mad-House" (c. 1726), where young Colonel Marathon feigns
himself mad in order to get access to his beloved Annilia, may perhaps
owe its inspiration to the coarser mad-house scenes of Middleton's
"Changeling."[8] On the whole, however, the drama but poorly repaid its
debt to prose fiction.

An indication of the multifarious origins of the short tales of love is
to be found in the nominal diversity of the setting. The scene, though
often laid in some such passion-ridden land as Spain or Italy, rarely
affects the nature of the story. But as in such novels as "Philidore and
Placentia" and "The Agreeable Caledonian" the characters wander widely
over the face of Europe and even come in contact with strange Eastern
climes, so the writers of romantic tales ransacked the remotest corners
of literature and history for sensational matter. The much elaborated
chronicle of the Moors was made to eke out substance for "The Arragonian
Queen" (1724), a story of "Europe in the Eighth Century," while
"Cleomelia: or, the Generous Mistress" was advertised as the "Secret
History of a Lady Lately Arriv'd from Bengall." The tendency to exploit
the romantic features of outlandish localities was carried to the
ultimate degree by Mrs. Penelope Aubin, whose characters range over
Africa, Turkey