who writes verses, sings, dances, and can say and do whatever she pleases, without the imputation of any thing that can injure her character; for she is so well known to have no passion but self-love, or folly but affectation, that now, upon any occasion, they only cry, ‘It is her way!’ and ‘That is so like her!’ without farther reflection.”  She quotes a “wonderfully just” passage from Milton, calls a licentious speech from Dryden’s “State of Innocence” an “odious thing,” and says “a thousand good things at random, but so strangely mixed, that you would be apt to say, all her wit is mere good luck, and not the effect of reason and judgment.”  In the second paper Sappho quotes examples of generous love from Suckling and Milton, but takes offence at a letter containing some sarcastic remarks on married women.  We know that Steele was personally acquainted with Mrs. Manley, and it is possible that he knew Mrs. Haywood, since she later dedicated a novel to him.  With some reservation, then, we may accept this sketch as a fair likeness.  As a young matron of seventeen or eighteen she was evidently a lively, unconventional, opinionated gadabout fond of the company of similar She-romps, who exchanged verses and specimen letters with the lesser celebrities of the literary world and perpetuated the stilted romantic traditions of the Matchless Orinda and her circle.  A woman of her independence of mind, we may imagine, could not readily submit to the authority of an arbitrary, orthodox clergyman husband.

Mrs. Haywood’s writings are full of the most lively scenes of marital infelicity due to causes ranging from theological disputes to flagrant licentiousness.  Her enemies were not so charitable as to attribute her flight from her husband to any reason so innocent as incompatibility of temper or discrepancy of religious views.  The position of ex-wife was neither understood nor tolerated by contemporary society.  In the words of a favorite quotation from “Jane Shore”: 

  “But if weak Woman chance to go astray,
  If strongly charm’d she leave the thorny Way,
  And in the softer Paths of Pleasure stray,
  Ruin ensues, Reproach and endless Shame;
  And one false Step entirely damns her Fame: 
  In vain, with Tears, the Loss she may deplore,
  In vain look back to what she was before,
  She sets, like Stars that fall, to rise no more!”

Eliza Haywood, however, after leaving the thorny way of matrimony, failed to carry out the laureate’s metaphor.  Having less of the fallen star in her than Mr. Rowe imagined, and perhaps more of the hen, she refused to set, but resolutely faced the world, and in spite of all rules of decorum, tried to earn a living for herself and her two children, if indeed as Pope’s slander implies, she had children to support.