The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza HaywoodWhicher, George Frisbie
General
The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood
Whicher, George Frisbie
Haywood, Eliza Fowler, 1693?-1756
The Prince and his bride return to their own country to receive the
crown. By the most tender assiduities Albaraizor has almost succeeded in
gaining the love of his wife when Abdelhamar again intrudes as
ambassador to congratulate him on his coronation. Though her old love
returns more strongly than ever, the Queen guards her honor well, and
insists that her lover marry Selyma, a captive Princess. But that lady,
stung by Abdelhamar's indifference, learns to hate him, and out of
revenge persuades the King that his wife is unfaithful to him. An
indiscreet letter from Abdelhamar confirms his suspicions. He orders
both Queen and ambassador cast into prison and by his woes destroys the
happiness of the whole court.
The passages relating the monarch's love and jealousy are described with
a fulness entirely lacking in the tournament scene quoted above, and we
may fairly infer that both writer and reader were more deeply interested
in affairs of the heart than in feats of arms, however glorious. The
emphasis given to love rather than to war in this tale is significant as
a contrast to the opposite tendency in such romances of a century later
as "Ivanhoe," in which a tournament scene very similar in outline to
that in "The Arragonian Queen" is told with the greatest attention to
warlike detail, while the love story, though not allowed to languish, is
kept distinctly subordinate to the narrative of chivalric adventure.
Mrs. Haywood, however, was too warm-blooded a creature to put aside the
interests of the heart for the sake of a barbarous Gothic brawl, and too
experienced a writer not to know that her greatest forte lay in painting
the tender rather than the sterner passions.
In this respect she forms a decided contrast to Defoe, whose men and
women are almost never startled out of their matter-of-fact attitude.
His picaresque characters, though outwardly rogues or their female
counterparts, have at bottom something of the dissenting parson and
cool-headed, middle-aged man of business. Whatever else they may be,
they are never love-sick. Passion is to them a questionable asset, and
if they marry, they are like to have the matter over with in the course
of half a paragraph. Eliza Haywood, however, possessed in excess the one
gift that Defoe lacked. To the scribbling authoress love was the force
that motivated all the world. Crude and conventional as are many of her
repeated attempts to analyze the workings of a mind under the sway of
soft desires, she nevertheless succeeded now and then in actuating her
heroines with genuine emotion. Both romance and realism were woven into
the intricate web of the Richardsonian novel, and the contribution of
Mrs. Haywood deserves to be remembered if only because she supplied the
one element missing in Defoe's masterpieces. Each writer in his day was
considered paramount in his or her particular field.[19]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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