Moreover, Mrs. Haywood’s re-establishment as an anonymous author seems to have been a work of some difficulty, necessitating a ten years’ struggle against adversity.  Between 1731 and 1741 she produced fewer books than during any single year of her activity after the publication of “Idalia” and before “The Dunciad.”  Her probable share in the “Secret Memoirs of Mr. Duncan Campbel” was merely that of a hack writer, her contributions to the “Opera of Operas” were of the most trifling nature, and the two volumes of “L’Entretien des Beaux Esprits” were not original.  For six years after the “Adventures of Eovaai” she sent to press no work now known to be hers, and not until the catch-penny “Present for a Servant-Maid” (1743) and the anonymous “Fortunate Foundlings” (1744) did her wares again attain the popularity of several editions.  All due credit must be allowed Mrs. Haywood for her persistent efforts to regain her footing as a woman of letters, for during this time she had little encouragement.  Pope’s attack did destroy her best asset, her growing reputation as an author, but instead of following Savage’s ill-natured advice to turn washerwoman, she remained loyal to her profession and in her later novels gained greater success than she had ever before enjoyed.  But it was only her dexterity that saved her from literary annihilation.[20]

The lesson of her hard usage at the hands of Pope and his allies, however, was not lost upon the adaptable dame.  After her years of silence Mrs. Haywood seems to have returned to the production of perishable literature with less inclination for gallantry than she had evinced in her early romances.  Warm-blooded creature though she was, Eliza could not be insensible to the cooling effect of age, and perhaps, too, she perceived the more sober moral taste of the new generation.  “In the numerous volumes which she gave to the world towards the latter part of her life,” says the “Biographia Dramatica,” somewhat hastily, “no author has appeared more the votary of virtue, nor are there any novels in which a stricter purity, or a greater delicacy of sentiment, has been preserved.”  Without discussing here the comparative decency of Mrs. Haywood’s later novels, we may admit at once, with few allowances for change of standard, the moral excellence of such works as “The Female Spectator” and “Epistles for the Ladies.”  Certainly if the penance paid by the reader is any test, the novelist was successful in her effort to atone for the looseness of her early writings, when she left the province of fiction for that of the periodical essay.

FOOTNOTES [1] Elwin and Courthope’s Pope, IV, 4.

[2] Elwin and Courthope’s Pope, IV, 135, note 3.

[3] Elwin and Courthope’s Pope, IV, 141.

[4] Elwin and Courthope ’s Pope, IV, 232.  Professor Lounsbury has apparently confused this work with A Cursory View of the History of Lilliput For these last forty three Years, 8vo,1727, a political satire containing no allusion to Pope.  See The Text of Shakespeare, 287.