SOURCE: "Reform by Self-Discovery: Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751)," in The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 147-52.

In the following excerpt from her study of female novelists in English, Spencer examines the theme of the reformed heroine in Haywood's novel Miss Betsy Thoughtless.

The change in Eliza Haywood's tone when she began writing novels again after the 1730s has already been mentioned. Betsy Thoughtless and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753) differ from her earlier works not just in the greater concessions to the new feminine modesty and morality in their presentation (making the famous scenes of seduction taboo), but in their more detailed and naturalistic rendering of both outer and inner realities, the heroine's environment and her thought-processes. Haywood had evidently learned from both Fielding and Richardson, but she adapted what she learned to...