“Thus I have attempted to trace nature in all her mazy windings, and shew life’s progress through the passions, from the cradle to the grave.—­The various adventures which happened to Natura, I thought, afforded a more ample field, than those of any one man I ever heard, or read of; and flatter myself, that the reader will find many instances, that may contribute to rectify his own conduct, by pointing out those things which ought to be avoided, or at least most carefully guarded against, and those which are worthy to be improved and imitated.”

The obvious and conventional moral ending and the shreds of romance that still adhere to the story need not blind us to its unusual features.  Besides insisting upon the necessity for psychological analysis of a sort, the author here for the first time becomes a genuine novelist in the sense that her confessed purpose is to depict the actual conditions of life, not to glorify or idealize them.  As Fielding was to do in “Tom Jones,” Mrs. Haywood proclaims the mediocrity of her hero as his most remarkable quality.  Had she been able to make him more than a lay figure distorted by various passions, she might have produced a real character.  Although at times he seems to be in danger of acquiring the romantic faculty of causing every woman he meets to fall in love with him, yet the glamor of his youth is obscured by a peaceful and ordinary old age.  Artificial in design and stilted in execution as the work is, it nevertheless marks Eliza Haywood’s emancipation from the traditions of the romance.[3]

In “The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless” (1751) she reached the full fruition of her powers as a novelist.  Her heroine, like Natura, is little more than a “humour” character, whose prevailing fault is denoted by her surname.[4] Though not fundamentally vicious, her heedless vanity, inquisitiveness, and vivacity lead her into all sorts of follies and embarrassments upon her first entry into fashionable life in London.  Among all the suitors who strive to make an impression upon her heart Mr. Trueworth alone succeeds, but her levity and her disregard of appearances force him to think her unworthy of his attentions.  Meanwhile her guardian’s wife, Lady Mellasin, has been turned out of the house for an egregious infidelity, and Betsy is left to her own scant discretion.  After somewhat annoying her brothers by receiving men at her lodgings, she elects under family pressure to marry a Mr. Munden, who quickly shows himself all that a husband should not be.  Eventually she has to abandon him, but demonstrates her wifely devotion by going back to nurse him through his last illness.  Mr. Trueworth’s mate in the interim has conveniently managed to succumb, his old passion revives, and exactly upon the anniversary of Mr. Munden’s death he arrives in a chariot and six to claim the fair widow, whose youthful levity has been chastened by the severe discipline of her unfortunate marriage.  Told in an easy and dilatory style and interspersed with the inevitable little histories and impassioned letters, the story attained the conventional bulk of four duodecimo volumes.