a friend’s house at Versailles, where Blessure secretly weds her.  After a short period of felicity, they are betrayed by an officious maid.  Blessure kills the Chevalier, but is himself wounded and cast into prison.  His father secures a pardon by promising the king’s mistress that the Count shall marry her daughter, but Blessure remains constant to Anadea, though keeping his marriage a secret for fear of infuriating his father.  He is sent away by his displeased parent to learn the virtue of obedience, while Anadea retires to St. Cloud to await her husband’s return.  There the story ends in an unexpected tragedy of incest and blood.

The back-stairs intrigues and the sensational horrors which to the majority of Mrs. Haywood’s readers doubtless seemed the chief attraction of the story are not different from the melodramatic features of countless other amatory tales, French and English.  But when for a dozen pages the author seeks to discover and explain the motives of her characters both by impersonal comment and by the self-revelation of letters, she is making a noteworthy step—­even if an unconscious one—­ toward the Richardsonian method of laying bare the inner natures of ordinary people.  She has here pursued the analysis of character as an end in itself, for in “The Fatal Secret” there is no hint of disguised scandal, nor any appeal to the pruriency of degenerate readers.  Sensational in the extreme the story is, but nevertheless the progress of the narrative is delayed while the sentiments of the heroine are examined in the minutest detail.  While better known romancers exploited chiefly the strange and surprising adventures (other than amorous) of their characters, or used the voyage imaginaire for the purposes of satire, Eliza Haywood and her female colleagues stimulated the popular taste for romances of the heart.  In trying to depict the working of intense human passions they rendered a distinct service to the development of English fiction.

The story of “The Mercenary Lover” (1726) involved, besides the ability to body forth emotion, considerable power to show a gradual degradation in the character of one of the heroines.

The avaricious Clitander gains the moiety of a fortune by marrying the young, gay Miranda, but cannot rest without securing to himself the portion of the elder sister as well.  Althea’s thoughtful and less volatile nature has hitherto resisted the assaults of love, but her insidious brother-in-law undermines her virtue by giving her wanton books and tempting her with soft speeches until she yields to his wishes.  When he attempts to make her sign a deed of gift instead of a will to provide for their child, she discovers his treachery and flees to the country.  By playing upon her tenderness he coaxes her back and poisons her.  Miranda is fully informed of her husband’s villainy, but contents herself with removing from the house.  Thus Clitander loses not only his sister-in-law’s, but his wife’s fortune as well, and is completely unmanned by remorse and apprehension.