Love in Excess · Or, the Fatal Enquiry

Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was one of the most successful writers of her time; indeed, the two most popular English novels in the early eighteenth-century were Robinson Crusoe and Haywood's first novel, Love in Excess. As this edition enables modern readers to discover, its enormous success is easy to understand.

Love in Excess is a well crafted novel in which the claims of love and ambition are pursued through multiple storylines until the heroine engineers a melodramatic conclusion. 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.