and the dissolute country-gentleman's daughters ("Spectator" No. 128)
who "read Volumes of Love-Letters and Romances to their Mother," a
_ci-devant_ coquette, give us perhaps a more accurate idea of the woman
novelist's public. Doubtless Mrs. Haywood's wares were known to the more
frothy minds of the polite world and to the daughters of middle-class
trading families, such as the sisters described in Defoe's "Religious
Courtship," whose taste for fashionable plays and novels was soon to
call the circulating library into being.

Beside the proceeds arising from the sale of her works, Mrs. Haywood
evidently expected and sometimes received the present of a guinea or so
in return for a dedication. Though patrons were not lacking for her
numerous works, it does not appear that her use of their names was
always authorized. In putting "The Arragonian Queen" under the
protection of Lady Frances Lumley, in fact, the author confessed that
she had not the happiness of being known to the object of her praise,
but wished to be the first to felicitate her publicly upon her nuptials.
We may be sure that the offering of "Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-
Lunenburgh" to the hero's namesake, Frederick, Prince of Wales, was both
unsanctioned and unacknowledged. Sometimes, however, the writer's
language implies that she had already experienced the bounty of her
patron, while in the case of the novel dedicated to Sir Richard Steele
at a time when his health and credit were fast giving way, Eliza can
hardly be accused of interested motives. Apparently sincere, too, though
addressed to a wealthy widow, was the tribute to Lady Elizabeth Germain
prefixed to "The Fruitless Enquiry"; and at least one other of Mrs.
Haywood's productions is known to have been in Lady Betty's library. But
these instances are decidedly exceptional. Usually the needy novelist's
dedications were made up of servile adulation and barefaced begging.
With considerable skill in choosing a favorable moment she directed a