Love in Excess: Eighteenth-Century Amatory Fiction of Desire, Secret Letters, Aristocratic Seduction, and Scandal

Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry is a charged amatory fiction of desire, secrecy, and social consequence, tracing the erotic entanglements surrounding Count D'Elmont and the women drawn into his orbit. Published in the early 1720s, it exemplifies the pre-Richardsonian novel's fascination with passion, epistolary disclosure, and moral ambiguity. Its heightened rhetoric, rapid plotting, and psychological attention to longing place it within the vibrant culture of early eighteenth-century romance and scandal fiction. Haywood, one of the most prolific and commercially successful writers of her generation, helped shape prose fiction before the canonization of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Her experience as actress, playwright, publisher, and professional author informed her acute sense of performance, gendered vulnerability, and public reputation. Love in Excess reflects a literary marketplace eager for stories that exposed the private costs of aristocratic libertinism and female sensibility. Readers interested in the origins of the English novel, women's writing, or the history of sexuality will find Love in Excess indispensable. It is both entertaining and intellectually rewarding: a work that reveals how early fiction made desire a serious subject of narrative art.