While seventeenth-century romances, both narrative and dramatic, told absorptive stories of Alexander the Great, Almanzor, or Pericles, they elevated the mundane pleasures of fictional narrative within the sanctified realm of history. In contrast, eighteenth-century narrative fictions dared to feature the sometimes reckless adventures of fictional nobodies such as Moll Flanders, Pamela and Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Evelina. Whether or not one accepts the idea that the novel might be in essence a Romantic genre, recasting Eliza Haywood as a Romantic novelist provides another explanation for the constant tension between Haywood and her contemporaries. Haywood's novel thus thematizes its own intractable problem. By creating a heroine who is oblivious to the dangers of her own absorptive desires, Haywood links successful resolution of the plot to the successful mediation of the pleasures inherent within that plot. In contrast, the successful outcome of Haywood's plot is largely dependent on Betsy's actual recognition of her own desires.