BooksRock.com - Kids Books At Amazing Low Prices!

The three novellas presented here--The Ditress'd Orphan, The City Jilt, and The Double Marriage--were published separately in 1726, but were originally intended for a single volume. Haywood was a dangerous entity in the eighteenth century: a writing woman, writing for women. Like many female authors before her, Haywood was labeled and condemned by men as unfeminine, licentious, immodest and usurping. She dared to wield that masculine instrument, the pen, and speak her mind in public like a man.

Eliza Haywood (1693? died Feb. 25, 1756, London) was a prolific English writer of sensational romantic novels that mirrored contemporary 18th-century scandals. She left her husband, a middle-aged clergyman, for the stage, supporting herself also by writing and adapting works for the theatre. She then turned to the extravagantly passionate fiction for which there was then a vogue, adopting the technique of writing novels based on scandals involving leaders of society, whom she denoted by initials. (The British Museum in London has a key giving their full names.)