a journalist or turned her energies
toward other means of making a livelihood, no evidence of the fact has
yet been discovered. It is possible that (to use the current euphemism)
'the necessity of her affairs may have obliged her to leave London and
even England until creditors became less insistent. There can be little
doubt that Mrs. Haywood visited the Continent at least once, but the
time of her going is uncertain.[29]
When she renewed her literary activity in 1742 with a translation of "La
Paysanne Parvenue" by the Chevalier de Mouhy, Mrs. Haywood did not
depend entirely upon her pen for support. A notice at the end of the
first volume of "The Virtuous Villager, or Virgin's Victory," as her
work was called, advertised "new books sold by Eliza Haywood, Publisher,
at the Sign of Fame in Covent Garden." Her list of publications was not
extensive, containing, in fact, only two items: I. "The Busy-Body; or
Successful Spy; being the entertaining History of Mons. Bigand ... The
whole containing great Variety of Adventures, equally instructive and
diverting," and II. "Anti-Pamela, or Feign'd Innocence detected, in a
Series of Syrena's Adventures: A Narrative which has really its
Foundation in Truth and Nature ... Publish'd as a necessary Caution to
all young Gentlemen. The Second Edition."[30] Mrs. Haywood's venture as
a publisher was transitory, for we hear no more of it. But taken
together with a letter from her to Sir Hans Sloane,[31] recommending
certain volumes of poems that no gentleman's library ought to be
without, the bookselling enterprise shows that the novelist had more
strings than one to her bow.
By one expedient or another Mrs. Haywood managed to exist fourteen years
longer and during that time wrote the best remembered of her works. Copy
from her pen supplied her publisher, Thomas Gardner, with a succession
of novels modeled on the French fiction of Marivaux and De Mouhy, with
periodical essays reminiscent of Addison, with moral letters, and with
conduct books of a nondescript but popular sort. The hard-worked
authoress even achieved a new reputation on the success of her
"Fortunate Foundlings" (1744), "Female Spectator" (1744-6), and her most
ambitious novel, "The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" (1751). The
productions known to be hers do not certainly represent the entire
output of her industry during this period, for since "The Dunciad" her
writing had been almost invariably anonymous. One or two
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