Haywood’s frankness about female sexuality may explain the later neglect of Love in Excess. (In contrast, her accomplished domestic novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, has remained available.) Love in Excess and its reception provide a lively and valuable record of the challenge that female desire posed to social decorum.
For the second Broadview edition, the appendix of eighteenth-century responses to Haywood has been considerably expanded.
David Oakleaf teaches in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. He specializes in fiction, from Eliza Haywood and Jonathan Swift to Laurence Sterne and Frances Burney.