During her thirty-odd years of ferociously energetic activity as a writer, Eliza Haywood produced some seventy books, including more than sixty works of fiction--novels, secret histories or scandal chronicles, tales, and romances. The sheer quantity of her fiction lends it a certain importance, though that is by no means its only distinction. From the hot-blooded Love in Excess of 1719-1720 to the more sober Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy of 1753, Haywood's gifts as a storyteller held the attention of her audience, and some of her books were among the most successful and controversial (if not the most admired) works to be published during the first half of the eighteenth century. A woman of amazing personal resilience, tenacity, and adaptability, Haywood lived an unconventional life apart from her clergyman husband, and she was frequently the subject of scandalous gossip. In her professional life she was an actress, playwright, poet, journalist...