On [Transcriber's note: sic] exception, however, to the customary
conventionality of Mrs. Haywood's heroines ought to be noted. Ordinarily
the novelist accepted the usual conception of man the pursuer and woman
the victim, but sometimes instead of letting lovely woman reap the
consequences of her folly after the fashion of Goldsmith's celebrated
lyric, she violated romantic tradition by making her disappointed
heroines retire into self-sufficient solitude, defying society. In real
life the author of these stories was even more uncompromising. Far from
pining in obscurity after her elopement from her husband, she continued
to exist in the broad light of day, gaining an independent living by the
almost unheard of occupation (as far as women were concerned) of
writing. If she was blighted, she gave no indication of the fact.
Something of the same defiant spirit actuated the unfortunate Belinda
and Cleomira of "The British Recluse" (1722).

Belinda, a young lady of fortune in Warwickshire, comes to London on
business and meets at her lodging-house a mysterious fair recluse.
Imagining that their lots may be somewhat akin, she induces the retired
beauty to relate the history of her misfortunes.

Cleomira upon her father's death is removed from the court to the
country by a prudent mother. She does not take kindly to housewifery,
and languishes until friends persuade her mother to let her attend a
ball. There she meets the glorious Lysander, and in spite of her
mother's care, runs away to join him in London. Her ruin and desertion
inevitably follow. The sight of a rival in her place makes her
frantically resolve to die by poison, but the apothecary gives her only
a harmless opiate. Thinking herself dying, she sends a last letter to
her faithless lover. When she awakes and hears how indifferently he has