The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood

Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Carol David and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
1915
This Monograph has been approved by the Department of English and Comparative Literature in Columbia University as a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication.
Executive Officer
Hitherto the most complete summary of Mrs. Haywood's life and writings has been Sir Sidney Lee's article in the Dictionary of National Biography, which adds much information not found in the earlier notices in Baker's Biographia Dramatica and Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary. The experienced palates of Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mr. Austin Dobson have tested the literary qualities respectively of the earlier and later aspects of her work. Professor Walter Raleigh, Dr. Charlotte E. Morgan, and Professor Saintsbury have briefly estimated the importance of her share in the change from romance to novel.
Perhaps the main reason for the inadequacy of these notices lies in the fact that no one library contains anything like a complete collection of Mrs. Haywood's innumerable books. In pursuit of odd items I have ransacked the British Museum, the Bodleian, and several minor literary museums in England, and in America the libraries of Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities, the Peabody Institute, and the University of Chicago. The search has enabled me to correct many inaccuracies in Miss Morgan's tentative list of prose fiction and even to supplement Mr. Esdaile's admirable List of English Tales and Prose Romances printed before 1740, which mentions only works now extant in British libraries.
In the Bibliography I have adopted an alphabetical arrangement as most convenient for ready reference. Under the various editions of each book I have referred to libraries, English or American, where copies are to be found. Or when no copy was to be had, I have referred to advertisements, either in the newspapers of the Burney Collection, in the Gentleman's Magazine, the Monthly, or the Critical, or in the catalogues of modern booksellers. In the Chronological List I have dated each work from the earliest advertisement of its publication.