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 complete summary of Mrs. Haywood's life and writings has been Sir Sidney Lee's article in the "Dictionary of National Biography," which adds much information not found in the earlier notices in Baker's "Biographia Dramatica" and Chalmers' "Biographical Dictionary." The experienced palates of Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mr. Austin Dobson have tested the literary qualities respectively of the earlier and later aspects of her work. Professor Walter Raleigh, Dr. Charlotte E. Morgan, and Professor Saintsbury have briefly estimated the importance of her share in the change from romance to novel.