Most accounts of Haywood in the 1720s stress her sexual alliances or the cultural scandal of her earliest fiction, but the more compelling story is of a young woman's journey towards literary professionalism and ultimately oppositional political engagement. Haywood began her public life ambitious for fame – as an actress first, and then perhaps as a coterie poet – but she found popular acclaim, almost by surprise it would seem, as a ‘best-selling’ novelist. Very soon she was writing as an ‘author by profession’ and by the end of the decade had developed the shrewd marketing practices that would serve her throughout her career. Her politics in the 1720s are not easily pegged, however. Her novels were not exactly written ‘outside the context of party politics and patronage’, as some have thought, but neither did she write as a Tory partisan. Dedications, panegyrical passages and records of friendships point instead toward a quest for protection and support from sometimes unexpected quarters. This chapter (and the next) will consider evidence for her partisan alignments and will conclude, with some reservations, that Haywood is probably best described as an opportunist by necessity in this phase of her career. But this is not to say that she lacked political principles or convictions. Even in the 1720s she was drawn to political themes to which she would return for the rest of her career, many of them concerned with social justice and truth-telling.

For this period there exists a relative wealth of information regarding her personal experiences and even, if some speculation is granted, her inner life.