At the same time as Defoe was probing the relationship between secret history and the novel in Moll Flanders and Roxana, one of his most prolific contemporaries – Eliza Haywood – was also writing works that also engage with both generic traditions. Between 1722 and 1727, Haywood published a number of works that bear the title ‘secret history’, including: The British Recluse; or, Secret History of Cleomira, Suppos' Dead (1722); The Masqueraders; or Fatal Curiosity: Being the Secret History of a Late Amour (1724); The Arragonian Queen: A Secret History (1724); Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots: Being the Secret History of Her Life and Reign (1725), and The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1727). Haywood's second set of collected works carries the title Secret Histories, Novels & Poems (1725) and a third, projected set of collected works was advertised as Secret Histories, Novels &c. in 1726, although it was never published.

Haywood's approach towards the relationship between secret history and the novel differs markedly from that of Defoe. While Defoe reworked the conventions of secret history in Roxana in such a way as to draw attention to the generic differences between the novel and secret history, it is hard to differentiate, in formal terms, between Haywood's self-styled ‘secret histories’ and her other novels, romances and histories. Indeed, the full title of Haywood's early story, The British Recluse; or, Secret History of Cleomira, Suppos' Dead. A Novel, suggests Haywood's lack of concern to discriminate between genres. Moreover, there is little apparent difference between the generic category of The Masqueraders, which bears the ‘secret history’ epithet on its title page, and its two companion pieces, The Fatal Secret: or Constancy in Disress (1724) and The Surprize; or, Constancy Rewarded (1724), which do not. Haywood's early twentieth-century biographer, George Frisbie Whicher, asserts that that many of Haywood's short romances ‘were described on the title-page as secret histories, while others apparently indistinguishable from them in kind were denominated novels’, and infers that ‘the writer attached no particular significance to her use of the term [secret history], but employed it as a means of stimulating a meretricious interest in her stories’.