pothouse amours of picaros and their doxies.  The chivalrous conventions of the heroic romances had degenerated into the formalities of gallantry, the exalted modesty of romantic heroines had sunk into a fearful regard for shaky reputations, and the picture of genteel life was filled with scenes of fraud, violence, and vice.  As the writers of anti-romances in the previous century had found a delicately malicious pleasure in exhibiting characters drawn from humble and rustic life performing the ceremonies and professing the sentiments of a good breeding foreign to their social position, so the scandal-mongering authors like Mrs. Haywood helped to make apparent the hollowness of the aristocratic conventions even as practiced by the aristocracy and the incongruity of applying exalted ideals derived from an outworn system of chivalry to everyday ladies and gentleman of the Georgian age.  Undoubtedly the writers of romans a clef did not bargain for this effect, for they clung to their princes and court ladies till the last, leaving to more able pens the task of making heroes and heroines out of cobblers and kitchen wenches.  But in representing people of quality as the “vilest and silliest part of the nation” Mrs. Haywood and her ilk prepared their readers to welcome characters drawn from their own station in society, and paved the way for that “confounding of all ranks and making a jest of order,” which, though deplored by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,[1] was nevertheless a condition of progress toward realism.

Quite apart from the slight merit of her writings, the very fact of Mrs. Haywood’s long career as a woman of letters would entitle her to much consideration.  About the middle of the seventeenth century women romancers, like women poets, were elegant triflers, content to add the lustre of wit to their other charms.  While Mme de La Fayette was gaining the plaudits of the urbane world for the delicatesse of “La Princesse de Cleves” and the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle was employing her genius upon the fantastic, philosophical “Description of a New World, called the Blazing World” (1668), women of another stamp were beginning to write fiction.  With the advent of Mme de Villedieu in France and her more celebrated contemporary, Mrs. Behn, in England, literature became a profession whereby women could command a livelihood.  The pioneer romancieres were commonly adventuresses in life as in letters, needy widows like Mrs. Behn, Mme de Gomez, and Mrs. Mary Davys, or cast mistresses like Mme de Villedieu, Mile de La Force, and Mrs. Manley, who cultivated Minerva when Venus proved unpropitious.  But although the divine Astraea won recognition from easy-going John Dryden and approbation from the profligate wits of Charles II’s court, her memory was little honored by the coterie about Pope and Swift.  When even the lofty ideals and trenchant style of Mary Astell served as a target for the ridicule of Mr. Bickerstaff ’s friends,[2] it was not remarkable