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 _délicatesse_ of "La Princesse de Clèves" 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 _romancières_ were commonly adventuresses in life as in letters, needy widows like Mrs. Behn, Mme de Gomez, and Mrs. Mary Davys, or cast mistresses like Mme de Villedieu, Mile de La Force, and Mrs. Manley, who cultivated Minerva when Venus proved unpropitious. But although the divine Astraea won recognition from easy-going John Dryden and approbation from the profligate wits of Charles II's court, her memory was little honored by the coterie about Pope and Swift. When even the lofty ideals and trenchant style of Mary Astell served as a target for the ridicule of Mr. Bickerstaff 's friends,[2] it was not remarkable that such authoresses as Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood should be dismissed from notice as infamous scribbling women.[3] Inded [Transcriber's note: sic] the position of women novelists was anything but assured at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They had to support the disfavor and even the malign attacks of established men of letters who scouted the pretensions of the inelegant to literary fame, and following the lead of Boileau, discredited the romance as absurd and unclassical. Moreover, the moral soundness of fictitious fables was questioned by scrupulous readers, and the amatory tales turned out in profusion by most of the female romancers were not calculated to reassure the pious, even though prefaced by assertions of didactic aim and tagged with an exemplary moral. Nevertheless the tribe of women who earned their living chiefly by the proceeds of their pens rapidly increased.[4]