An indication of the multifarious origins of the short tales of love is to be found in the nominal diversity of the setting.  The scene, though often laid in some such passion-ridden land as Spain or Italy, rarely affects the nature of the story.  But as in such novels as “Philidore and Placentia” and “The Agreeable Caledonian” the characters wander widely over the face of Europe and even come in contact with strange Eastern climes, so the writers of romantic tales ransacked the remotest corners of literature and history for sensational matter.  The much elaborated chronicle of the Moors was made to eke out substance for “The Arragonian Queen” (1724), a story of “Europe in the Eighth Century,” while “Cleomelia:  or, the Generous Mistress” was advertised as the “Secret History of a Lady Lately Arriv’d from Bengall.”  The tendency to exploit the romantic features of outlandish localities was carried to the ultimate degree by Mrs. Penelope Aubin, whose characters range over Africa, Turkey, Persia, the East and West Indies, and the North American continent, often with peculiar geographical results.  But neither Mrs. Aubin nor Mrs. Haywood was able to use the gorgeous local color that distinguished Mrs. Behn’s “Oroonoko,” and still less did they command the realistic imagination that could make the travels of a Captain Singleton lifelike.

Even when, as in “The Mercenary Lover,” the setting is transferred to “the Metropolis of one of the finest Islands in the World,” and the action takes place “in the neighborhood of a celebrated Church, in the Sound of whose Bells the Inhabitants of that populous City think it an Honour to be born,"[9] the change is unaccompanied by any attempt at circumstantial realism.  We are told that Belinda of “The British Recluse” is a young lady of Warwickshire, that Fantomina follows her lover to Bath in the guise of a chambermaid, or that “The Fair Hebrew” relates the “true, but secret history of two Jewish ladies who lately resided in London,” but without the labels the settings could not be distinguished from the vague and unidentified mise en scene of such a romance as “The Unequal Conflict.”  Placentia in England raves of her passion for Philidore exactly as Alovisa in Paris, Emanuella in Madrid,[10] or Cleomelia in Bengal expose the raptures and agonies of their passions.  The hero of “The Double Marriage” (1726) rescues a distressed damsel in the woods outside of Plymouth exactly as one of Ariosto’s or Spenser’s knights-errant might have done in the fairy country of old romance.  In the sordid tale of “Irish Artifice,” printed in Curll’s “Female Dunciad” (1728), no reader could distinguish in the romantic names Aglaura and Merovius the nationality or the meanness of a villainous Irish housekeeper and her son.  And though the tale is the very reverse of romantic, it contains no hint of actual circumstance.  The characters in Mrs. Haywood’s early fiction move in an imaginary world, sometimes, it is true, marked with the names of real places, but no more truly realistic than the setting of “Arcadia” or “Parthenissa.”