and her circle. A woman of her independence of mind, we may imagine,
could not readily submit to the authority of an arbitrary, orthodox
clergyman husband.

Mrs. Haywood's writings are full of the most lively scenes of marital
infelicity due to causes ranging from theological disputes to flagrant
licentiousness. Her enemies were not so charitable as to attribute her
flight from her husband to any reason so innocent as incompatibility of
temper or discrepancy of religious views. The position of ex-wife was
neither understood nor tolerated by contemporary society. In the words
of a favorite quotation from "Jane Shore":

"But if weak Woman chance to go astray,
If strongly charm'd she leave the thorny Way,
And in the softer Paths of Pleasure stray,
Ruin ensues, Reproach and endless Shame;
And one false Step entirely damns her Fame:
In vain, with Tears, the Loss she may deplore,
In vain look back to what she was before,
She sets, like Stars that fall, to rise no more!"

Eliza Haywood, however, after leaving the thorny way of matrimony,
failed to carry out the laureate's metaphor. Having less of the fallen
star in her than Mr. Rowe imagined, and perhaps more of the hen, she
refused to set, but resolutely faced the world, and in spite of all
rules of decorum, tried to earn a living for herself and her two
children, if indeed as Pope's slander implies, she had children to
support.

The ways in which a woman could win her bread outside the pale of