to Jemmy’s disadvantage.  She is saved from the rudeness of Celandine by the intrusion of the gallant’s jealous mistress, who faints when foiled in her attempt to stab Jenny, but later relates the story of her ruin.  This narrative is enough to disgust Lady Speck with her foppish admirer and to make her sensible of the merits of Mr. Lovegrove.  In spite of Bellpine’s industrious slander and in spite of seemingly incontrovertible proof of Jemmy’s inconstancy, Jenny’s faith in her lover remains unshaken.  After tedious delays he finally rejoins her in London, but learning the full extent of Bellpine’s treachery, he wounds him seriously in a duel and is obliged to seek safety in France.  After causing the lovers untold anxiety, the injured man recovers, and Jenny forestalls her lover’s return by joining her friends on their wedding journey to Paris.  There she finds her adored Jessamy now fully sensible of the merits of his treasure.  He does not fail to press for a speedy termination to their delays, and Jenny is not unwilling to crown his love by a “happy catastrophe.”

Besides being unwarrantably expanded by a wealth of tedious detail, the novel has little merit as a piece of realism.  The society of Lord Humphreys and Lady Specks was not that in which Eliza Haywood commonly moved, but she had lived upon the skirts of gay life long enough to imitate its appearances.  Although she exhibits the diamond tassels sparkling in St. James’s sun or the musk and amber that perfume the Mall, she never penetrates beyond externalities.  The sentiments of her characters are as inflated as those of a Grandison and her picture of refined society as ridiculously stilted as Richardson’s own.  The scene whether in London, Bath, Oxford, or Paris, is described with more attention to specific detail than appeared in her early romances, but compared with the setting of “Humphrey Clinker” her glittering world appears pale and unreal.  Mrs. Haywood had so framed her style to suit the short, rapid tale of passion that she never moved easily in the unwieldy novel form.  Consequently her best narrative is to be found in the digressions, a chapter or two long, which are equivalent to little histories upon the old model.  In them the progress of the action is unimpeded, compressed, and at times even sprightly.

Recognizing, perhaps, her inability to cope with a plot of any extent, Mrs. Haywood adopted in her next novel a plan that permitted her to include a pot-pourri of short narratives, conversations, letters, reflections, and miscellaneous material without damaging the comprehensive scheme of her story.  Except that it lacks the consistent purpose of traducing the fair fame of her contemporaries,[18] “The Invisible Spy” (1755), written under the pseudonym of “Exploralibus,” is not essentially different in structure from the “Memoirs of a Certain Island.”  Love is still the theme of most of the anecdotes, no longer the gross passion that proves every woman at heart