novels did not fail to arouse the wrath of persons in high station, and Alexander Pope made of the writer’s known, though never acknowledged connection with pieces of the sort a pretext for showing his righteous zeal in the cause of public morality and his resentment of a fancied personal insult.  The torrent of filthy abuse poured upon Eliza in “The Dunciad” seems to have seriously damaged her literary reputation.  During the next decade she wrote almost nothing, and after her curious allegorical political satire in the form of a romance, the “Adventures of Eovaai” (1736), the authoress dropped entirely out of sight.  For six years no new work came from her pen.  What she was doing during this time remains a puzzle.  She could hardly have been supported by the rewards of her previous labors, for the gains of the most successful novelists at this period were small.  If she became a journalist or turned her energies toward other means of making a livelihood, no evidence of the fact has yet been discovered.  It is possible that (to use the current euphemism) ’the necessity of her affairs may have obliged her to leave London and even England until creditors became less insistent.  There can be little doubt that Mrs. Haywood visited the Continent at least once, but the time of her going is uncertain.[29]

When she renewed her literary activity in 1742 with a translation of “La Paysanne Parvenue” by the Chevalier de Mouhy, Mrs. Haywood did not depend entirely upon her pen for support.  A notice at the end of the first volume of “The Virtuous Villager, or Virgin’s Victory,” as her work was called, advertised “new books sold by Eliza Haywood, Publisher, at the Sign of Fame in Covent Garden.”  Her list of publications was not extensive, containing, in fact, only two items:  I.  “The Busy-Body; or Successful Spy; being the entertaining History of Mons. Bigand ...  The whole containing great Variety of Adventures, equally instructive and diverting,” and II.  “Anti-Pamela, or Feign’d Innocence detected, in a Series of Syrena’s Adventures:  A Narrative which has really its Foundation in Truth and Nature ...  Publish’d as a necessary Caution to all young Gentlemen.  The Second Edition."[30] Mrs. Haywood’s venture as a publisher was transitory, for we hear no more of it.  But taken together with a letter from her to Sir Hans Sloane,[31] recommending certain volumes of poems that no gentleman’s library ought to be without, the bookselling enterprise shows that the novelist had more strings than one to her bow.

By one expedient or another Mrs. Haywood managed to exist fourteen years longer and during that time wrote the best remembered of her works.  Copy from her pen supplied her publisher, Thomas Gardner, with a succession of novels modeled on the French fiction of Marivaux and De Mouhy, with periodical essays reminiscent of Addison, with moral letters, and with conduct books of a nondescript but popular sort.  The hard-worked authoress even achieved a new reputation on the success