In "The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" (1751) she reached the full fruition of her powers as a novelist. Her heroine, like Natura, is little more than a "humour" character, whose prevailing fault is denoted by her surname.[4] Though not fundamentally vicious, her heedless vanity, inquisitiveness, and vivacity lead her into all sorts of follies and embarrassments upon her first entry into fashionable life in London. Among all the suitors who strive to make an impression upon her heart Mr. Trueworth alone succeeds, but her levity and her disregard of appearances force him to think her unworthy of his attentions. Meanwhile her guardian's wife, Lady Mellasin, has been turned out of the house for an egregious infidelity, and Betsy is left to her own scant discretion. After somewhat annoying her brothers by receiving men at her lodgings, she elects under family pressure to marry a Mr. Munden, who quickly shows himself all that a husband should not be. Eventually she has to abandon him, but demonstrates her wifely devotion by going back to nurse him through his last illness. Mr. Trueworth's mate in the interim has conveniently managed to succumb, his old passion revives, and exactly upon the anniversary of Mr. Munden's death he arrives in a chariot and six to claim the fair widow, whose youthful levity has been chastened by the severe discipline of her unfortunate marriage. Told in an easy and dilatory style and interspersed with the inevitable little histories and impassioned letters, the story attained the conventional bulk of four duodecimo volumes. As Mr. Austin Dobson has pointed out,[5] Mrs. Haywood's novel is remarkable for its scant allusions to actual places and persons. Once mention is made of an appointment "at General Tatten's bench, opposite Rosamond's pond, in St. James's Park," and once a character refers to Cuper's Gardens, but except for an outburst of unexplained virulence directed against Fielding,[6] there is hardly a thought of the novelist's contemporaries. Here is a change indeed from the method of the _chronique scandaleuse_, and a restraint to be wondered at when we remember the worthies caricatured by so eminent a writer as Smollett. But even more remarkable is the difference of spirit between "Betsy Thoughtless" and Mrs. Haywood's earlier and briefer romances. The young _romancière_ who in 1725 could write, "Love is a Topick which I believe few are ignorant of ... a shady Grove and purling Stream are all Things that's necessary to give us an Idea of the tender Passion,"[7] had in a quarter of a century learned much worldly wisdom, and her heroine likewise is too sophisticated to be moved by the style of love-making that warmed the susceptible bosoms of Anadea, Filenia, or Placentia. One of Betsy's suitors, indeed, ventured upon the romantic vein with no very favorable results.