but he by mistake gives her one of Alovisa’s, whose handwriting she immediately recognizes.  When the polite Count returns to enquire after her health, she accuses her lover and friend of duplicity, faints, and letting fall Alovisa’s letter from her bosom, brings about an eclaircissement between D’Elmont and that lady.  Before Amena’s recovery the Count hastens away to welcome his brother, and when the imprudent girl has been safely lodged in a convent, D’Elmont, moved more by ambition than by love, weds the languishing Alovisa.

After his marriage the Count soon quarrels with his wife and consoles himself by falling in love with his ward, the matchless Melliora, but the progress of his amour is interrupted by numerous unforeseen accidents.  The mere suspicion of his inconstancy raises his wife’s jealousy to a fever heat.  To expose her rival she pretends to yield to the persuasions of her wooer, the Baron D’Espernay, but as a result of a very intricate intrigue both Alovisa and the Baron perish accidentally on the swords of D’Elmont and his brother.

Melliora retires to a convent, and her lover goes to travel in Italy, where his charms cause one lady to take poison for love of him, and another to follow him disguised as the little foot-page Fidelio.  In helping Melliora’s brother to elope with a beautiful Italian girl, the Count again encounters his beloved Melliora, now pursued by the Marquis de Sanguillier.  In a dramatic denouement she deserts the Marquis at the altar and throws herself upon the protection of her guardian.  The disappointed bridegroom is consoled by the discovery of an old flame who has long been serving him secretly in the capacity of chambermaid.  Fidelio reveals her identity and dies of hopeless love, pitied by all.  The three surviving couples marry at once, and this time the husbands “continue, with their fair Wives, great and lovely Examples of conjugal Affection.”

Such, with the omission of all secondary narratives, is the main plot of Eliza Haywood’s first novel.

“Love in Excess” best illustrates the similarity of sensational fiction to clap-trap drama, but others of her early works bear traces of the author’s familiarity with the theatre.  The escape of the pair of lovers from an Oriental court, already the theme of countless plays including Mrs. Haywood ’s own “Pair Captive,” was re-vamped to supply an episode in “Idalia” (1723), and parts of the same novel are written in concealed blank verse that echoes the heroic Orientalism of some of Dryden’s tragedies.  In the character of Grubguard, the amorous alderman of “The City Jilt” (1726), Mrs. Haywood apparently had in mind not Alderman Barber, whom the character little resembles, but rather Antonio in Otway’s “Venice Preserved.”  And the plot of “The Distressed Orphan, or Love in a Mad-House” (c. 1726), where young Colonel Marathon feigns himself mad in order to get access to his beloved Annilia, may perhaps owe its inspiration to the coarser mad-house scenes of Middleton’s “Changeling."[8] On the whole, however, the drama but poorly repaid its debt to prose fiction.