The Danger of Giving Way to Passion was the title given to a collection advertised as ‘speedily to be publish'd’ in the final pages of Eliza Haywood's translation Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (1720). The anthology was to comprise five ‘exemplary novels': The British Recluse: or, the Secret History of Cleomira, Suppos'd Dead (1722), The Injur'd Husband; or, the Mistaken Resentment (1722), Lasselia: or, the Self-Abandon'd (1723), The Rash Resolve: or, The Untimely Discovery (1723) and Idalia: or, the Unfortunate Mistress (1723).1 In the end, for reasons that remain unclear, each title appeared individually, and was then republished in Haywood's four-volume Works of 1724, along with Love in Excess (1719–20), Letters from a Lady of Quality and plays and poems. The Danger of Giving Way to Passion could, nevertheless, serve as a title for this volume, which brings together two of Haywood's novellas, one early and one late. Neither has appeared before in a critical edition. Both exemplify ‘the danger of giving way to passion’. The Rash Resolve tells the story of Emanuella, who is seduced by Count Emilius, bears his illegitimate child, and then dies. Life's Progress through the Passions: or, The Adventures of Natura (1748) concerns a hero who gives in to sexual and other passions, and finds himself financially entrapped, cuckolded by his own brother, and on the verge of marrying, beneath his class, a yeoman's daughter. By the end of the novel he too is dead. So described, both works could invite the charge levelled at Haywood's novels, in her own time and since, that she wrote rather to indulge her readers' enjoyment of ‘warm scenes’ than to reform their morals.