SOURCE: Introduction to Masquerade Novels of Eliza Haywood, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1986, pp. 5-20.

In the following essay, Schofield provides an overview of the theme of masking in four of Haywood's popular novels.

Eliza Fowler Haywood (1693?-1756) is the most popular and prolific of English eighteenth-century women novelists. Writing some sixty-odd novels and romances, she also found time to produce the first magazine by and for women (The Female Spectator), compose conduct-guide books (e.g., Love Letters on All Occasions; The Wife; The Husband in Answer to the Wife) and dramas (e.g., Frederick, Duke of Lunenburg-Saxon; The Fair Captive; A Wife to be Lett), and create some verses. Not only the sheer number of her works, but her continual repetition of popular romance patterns (e.g., love in excess, persecuted virtue) together with the symbolic matrixes propounded in these tales (i.e., imprisonment, escape, confinement, masquerade) make her...