s
not Richardson, the meticulous inventor of the epistolary novel, but the
past-mistress of sensational romance who is credited with originating
the English domestic novel. Compared with the delicate perceptions and
gentle humor of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, Mrs. Haywood's best
volumes are doubtless dreary enough, but even if they only crudely
foreshadow the work of incomparably greater genius, they represent an
advance by no means slight. From "Love in Excess" to "Betsy Thoughtless"
was a step far more difficult than from the latter novel to "Evelina."
As pioneers, then, the author of "Betsy Thoughtless" and her obscurer
contemporaries did much to prepare the way for the notable women
novelists who succeeded them. No modern reader is likely to turn to the
"Ouida" of a bygone day--as Mr. Gosse calls her--for amusement or for
admonition, but the student of the period may find that Eliza Haywood's
seventy or more books throw an interesting sidelight upon public taste
and the state of prose fiction at a time when the half created novel was
still "pawing to get free his hinder parts."

FOOTNOTES

[1]
E. Bernbaum, _Mrs. Behn's Biography a Fiction_, PMLA, XXVIII, 432.

[2]
David Erskine Baker, _Companion to the Play House_, 1764.

[3]
The London Parish Registers contain no mention of an Eliza Fowler in
1693, but on 21 January, 1689, O.S., "Elizabeth dau. of Robert ffowler
[Transcriber's note: sic] & Elizabeth his wife" was christened at St.
Peter's, Cornhill. Later entries show that Robert was a hosier to his
trade. Possibly in suppressing the other particulars of her life, Mrs.
Haywood may have consigned to oblivion a year or two of her age, but in
her numerous writings I have not found any allusion that could lead to her
positive identification with the daughter of Robert Fowler.

[4]
He was the author of _An Examination of Dr. Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine
of the Trinity, with a Confutation of it_ (1719). The work is a
paragraph by paragraph refutation from the authority of scripture of the
_Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity_ (1712) by the metaphysical Dr.
Samuel Clarke, whose unorthodox views prevented Queen Caroline from
making him Archbishop of Canterbury. The Reverend Mr. Haywood was upon
safe ground in attacking a book already condemned in Convocation.

[5]
"Whereas Elizabeth Haywood, Wife of the Reverend Mr. Valentine Haywood,
eloped from him her Husband on Saturday the 26th of November last past,
and wen