Thanks to her inclusion in Alexander Pope's mock epic poem

Thanks to her inclusion in Alexander Pope's mock epic poem "The Dunciad" as a vacuous figure willing to write (and perhaps do) anything for financial recompense, Eliza Haywood was long regarded as of marginal importance in the literary history of the "long"18th century. Many of her best-known novels have been described as "amatory fiction", a genre not considered central to the British novel tradition. Thus, until recently, even her supporters had little to say for her style, often emphasizing the historical importance of her journalism.

A closer examination of Haywood's novels indicates that disregarding her fiction in such a manner would be a mistake. Even if works such as the early "Love in Excess" and the late "The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" did not influence 19th-century novelists to the extent that more famous novels such as Richardson's "Pamela" and Fielding's "Tom Jones" did, they reveal a prose writer presenting both structural innovations and a surprisingly forward-looking view of society. Her shifting attitudes regarding class, courtship, and marriage are reflected in a noticeable change from her early novels to her more mature works, suggesting that she ought to be considered as more than a simple polemicist.

In fact, as Paula Backscheider has shown, Haywood's substantial corpus had more of an impact on the British novel tradition than was previously suspected. Haywood's "Anti-Pamela", a satire of Richardson's didactic novel, was as widely read as Fielding's parody of the same, and "Betsy Thoughtless" can be seen as the beginning of a tradition of novels of marriage, which culminated in Bronte's "Jane Eyre". Most importantly, the 18th-century novel was largely concerned with domestic issues hinging on the role of women, and Haywood's dozens of works are among the best representations we have of a female perspective on such topics.

1.The author's main point is that

(A) next to parodies such as "The Dunciad" and "Anti-Pamela", novels of marriage were much more crucial to the development of the novel.
(B) it is a mistake to treat Haywood's polemical journalism as more than a historical curiosity.
(C) Haywood's novels are valuable in more ways than were thought by previous generations of scholars.
(D) 18th-century novels by women such as Haywood deserve more attention that novels by men, such as Richardson and Fielding, on women's topics.
(E) "amatory fiction" influenced many important novelists writing in the 19th century.



2. The primary purpose of the passage is to

(A) offer sociohistorical explanations for the prevalence of female novelists in the 18th century
(B) examine how one novelist has been viewed by scholars throughout history
(C) show why an underrated novelist should be taken more seriously
(D) propose a new ranking of prose writers in the 18th century to reflect more modern literary preferences
(E) outline specific distinctions between well-known novelists that have long been considered equals