The little amatory tales which formed Mrs. Haywood's chief stock in
trade when she first set up for a writer of fiction, inherited many of
the characteristics of the long-winded French romances. Though some were
told with as much directness as any of the intercalated narratives in
"Clélie" or "Cléopâtre," others permitted the inclusion of numerous
"little histories" only loosely connected with the main plot. Letters
burning with love or jealousy were inserted upon the slightest
provocation, and indeed remained an important component of Eliza
Haywood's writing, whether the ostensible form was romance, essay, or
novel. Scraps of poetry, too, were sometimes used to ornament her
earliest effusions, but the other miscellaneous features of the
romances--lists of maxims, oratory, moral discourses, and conversations
--were discarded from the first. The language of these short romances,
while generally more easy and often more colloquial than the absurd
extravagances of the translators of heroic romances and their imitators,
still smacked too frequently of shady groves and purling streams to be
natural. Many conventional themes of love or jealousy, together with
such stock types as the amorous Oriental potentate, the lover disguised
as a slave, the female page, the heroine of excessive delicacy, the
languishing beauty, the ravishing sea-captain, and the convenient pirate
persisted in the pages of Mrs. Barker, Mrs. Haywood, and Mrs. Aubin. As
in the interminable tomes of Scudéry, love and honor supplied the place
of life and manners in the tales of her female successors, and though in
some respects their stories were nearer the standard of real conduct,
new novel on the whole was but old romance writ small.

In attempting to revitalize the materials and methods of the romances
Mrs. Haywood was but following the lead of the French _romancières_, who
had successfully invaded the field of prose fiction when the passing of