But perhaps it is only fair to let the author speak for herself.

“The Lady, whose Letters I have taken the liberty to translate, tho she has been cautious enough in expressing any thing (even in those the most tender among them) which can give the Reader an Assurance she had forfeited her Virtue; yet there is not one, but what sufficiently proves how impossible it is to maintain such a Correspondence, without an Anxiety and continual Perturbation of Mind, which I think a Woman must have bid farewell to her Understanding, before she could resolve to endure.

“In the very first she plainly discovers the Agitation of her Spirits, confesses she knows herself in the wrong, and that every Expression her Tenderness forces from her, is a Stab to her Peace; she dreads the Effects of her Lover’s too powerful Attractions, doubts her own Strength of resisting such united Charms as she finds in him, and trembles at the Apprehensions, that by some unlucky Accident the Secret should be known.  Every thing alarms her ...  ’Tis impossible to be conscious of any thing we wish to conceal, without suspecting the most undesigning Words and Actions as Snares laid to entrap us ...  So this unfortunate Lady, divided between Excess of Love, and Nicety of Honour, could neither resolve to give a loose to the one, nor entirely obey the Precepts of the other, but suffered herself to be tossed alternately by both.  And tho the Person she loved was most certainly (if such a thing can be) deserving all the Condescensions a Woman could make, by his Assiduity, Constancy, and Gratitude, yet it must be a good while before she could receive those Proofs; and the Disquiets she suffered in that time of Probation, were, I think, if no worse ensued, too dear a Price for the Pleasure of being beloved by the most engaging and most charming of his Sex.”

The “Discourse concerning Writings of this Nature,” from which the above quotation is taken, makes no attempt to consider other series of amorous letters, but proceeds to enforce by platitudes and scraps of poetry the only too obvious moral of the lady of quality’s correspondence.  The author remembers how “a Lady of my Acquaintance, perhaps not without reason, fell one day, as she was sitting with me, into this Poetical Exclamation: 

  ’The Pen can furrow a fond Female’s Heart,
  And pierce it more than Cupid’s talk’d-of Dart: 
  Letters, a kind of Magick Virtue have,
  And, like strong Philters, human Souls enslave!’”

After thirty pages of moralizing the writer comes to a conclusion with the reflection, a commonplace of her novels, that “if the little I have done, may give occasion to some abler Pen to expose [such indiscretions] more effectually, I shall think myself happy in having given a hint, which improv’d, may be of so general a Service to my Sex.”  But the impression left by this and others of Mrs. Haywood’s works is that the fair novelist was not so much interested in preventing the inadvertencies of her sex as in exposing them.