Belinda, a young lady of fortune in Warwickshire, comes to London on business and meets at her lodging-house a mysterious fair recluse.  Imagining that their lots may be somewhat akin, she induces the retired beauty to relate the history of her misfortunes.

Cleomira upon her father’s death is removed from the court to the country by a prudent mother.  She does not take kindly to housewifery, and languishes until friends persuade her mother to let her attend a ball.  There she meets the glorious Lysander, and in spite of her mother’s care, runs away to join him in London.  Her ruin and desertion inevitably follow.  The sight of a rival in her place makes her frantically resolve to die by poison, but the apothecary gives her only a harmless opiate.  Thinking herself dying, she sends a last letter to her faithless lover.  When she awakes and hears how indifferently he has received the report of her death, she at length overcomes her unhappy passion, and retires from the world.

Belinda then relates how her marriage with the deserving Worthly was postponed by her father’s death.  In the interim the captivating Sir Thomas Courtal has occasion to render her a slight service at the overturn of her coach, and fires her with a passion which her mild esteem for Worthly is too weak to overcome.  Courtal perceives and encourages her fondness, though he poses as Worthly’s friend.  She gives him an assignation in a wood, where she is saved from becoming a victim to his lust only by the timely arrival of her true admirer.  In the duel that ensues Worthly falls, Courtal flees, and a little later Belinda goes to London in hopes of seeing him.  At the playhouse she is only too successful in beholding him in a box accompanied by his wife and mistress.  From the gossip of her friends she learns that his real name is Lord——­, and from one of the ladies she hears such stories of his villainy that she can no longer doubt him to be a monster.

Worthly, meanwhile, has recovered from his wound and weds Belinda’s sister.  Lysander and Courtal prove to be in reality the same bland villain, the inconstant Bellamy.  His two victims, sympathizing in their common misfortune, agree to retire together to a remote spot where they can avoid all intercourse with the race of men.  “And where a solitary Life is the effect of Choice, it certainly yields more solid Comfort, than all the publick Diversions which those who are the greatest Pursuers of them can find.”

The same admirable sentiment was shared by the surviving heroine of “The Double Marriage:  or, the Fatal Release” (1726), who after witnessing a signal demonstration of the perfidy of man, resolves to shun for ever the false sex.