The Fortunate Foundlings: Being the Genuine History of Colonel M——rs, and His Sister, Madam Du P——Y, the Issue of the Hon. Ch——es M——rs, Son of the Late Duke of R—— L——D. Containing Many Wonderful Accidents That Befel Them in Their Travels, and Interspersed with the Characters and Adventures of Several Persons of Condition, in the Most Polite Courts of Europe. the Whole Calculated for the Entertainment and Improvement of the Youth of Both Sexes.

Eliza Fowler Haywood was publishing decades before Jane Austen, yet this novel asks the same devastating question: what happens to a woman without fortune or family in a world that values her only as property? The answer, in this swirling picaresque tale, is both alarming and propulsive. Twins Horatio and Louisa are abandoned as infants and taken in by the benevolent Dorilaus, who raises them with every advantage. But when they come of age, the siblings must leave his protection and face a brutal truth: the world offers Horatio a soldier's honorable path, while Louisa, without dowry or connections, has only the perilous option of becoming a lady's companion. What follows is a brilliantly episodic journey through the courts and battlefields of Europe, where Louisa discovers that even the most polished aristocratic settings conceal predators, and where her brother's military glory comes at a price neither of them anticipated. Haywood, once as famous as Fielding and Smollett, wrote with a feminist fury that her male contemporaries rarely matched. The Fortunate Foundlings is both a ripping adventure and a sharp examination of how society abandons women the moment they stop being useful. It remains essential reading for anyone who believes the novel was invented to tell women's stories.