Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Delarivier Manley
-
Standard Name: Manley, Delarivier
Birth Name: Delarivier Manley
Married Name: Delarivier Manley
Nickname: Dela
Indexed Name: Mary de la Riviere Manley
Indexed Name: Mary Delarivier Manley
Pseudonym: Melpomene
Pseudonym: Thalia
Pseudonym: Delia
Pseudonym: The Translator of the New Atalantis
Pseudonym: Rivella
Used Form: Delarivière Manley
DM
was a pioneer in many fields: poetry, drama, journalism, and fiction, and the genres with which the fiction of her period interlocked: letters, soft pornography, satire, secret history, romance autobiography, and political polemic. She was proud of being first in the field on the Tory side during the pamphlet wars of Queen Anne's reign. As critic Paula McDowell
remarks, her writing identity was shaped by the new concept of print culture as an industry, an employer of labour.
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon, 1998.
Delarivier Manley
printed some of SF
's letters in The Lady's Pacquet of Letters.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Anthologization
Catharine Trotter
CT
contributed Calliope: The Heroick Muse to The Nine Muses, Manley
's collection of elegies by women on Dryden
's death, published by 26 September 1700.
Bowyer, John Wilson. The Celebrated Mrs Centlivre. Duke University Press, 1952.
31-2
A different poem by her, On the...
Anthologization
Catharine Trotter
The ascription has been subject to some question, since the formerly accepted birthdate for CT
made her only fourteen at the time; the date established by more recent scholarship makes her approaching twenty.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The volume,...
Anthologization
Sarah, Lady Piers
SLP
was one of the contributors to The Nine Muses, the all-female anthology of elegies on the death of Dryden
which was edited by Delarivier Manley
, and published in 1700. She expressed some...
Cultural formation
Sarah, Lady Piers
SLP
was born into the English gentry. Her poetry makes it clear that she was a pious Anglican
, a convinced Whig, and a patriotic supporter of the Protestant succession.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Allegations by Delarivier Manley
that...
death
John Dryden
After an immediate burial at St Anne's Church, Soho, Dryden was given a Westminster Abbey funeral and buried in the grave of Chaucer
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Poets lamenting his death included the all-female contributors to The...
Education
Elizabeth Boyd
EB
says nothing about how she learned the things she knew—an acquaintance with English literature, some history, and at least a smattering of French and Latin—but she may well have been largely self-taught. She often...
Family and Intimate relationships
Sarah Fyge
SF
and Egerton had no children. Their bad relations were evidently notorious, since Manley
represented the pair in violent and grotesque physical combat.
Nicholls, C. S., editor. The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons. Oxford University Press, 1993.
205
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Gunning
It was known that Lorne had been in the running before Blandford, who was financially and socially a better catch. Gossips speculated. Love-letters from Blandford, and a letter from the Duke of Marlborough welcoming EG
Fictionalization
Eliza Haywood
EH
's reputation during her lifetime and immediately afterwards (bolstered by Pope's image of her in the Dunciad) was of the quintessential practitioner of the novel, seen as low-grade entertainment both intellectually and morally...
Fictionalization
Mary Pix
MP
, with Manley
and Trotter
, was lampooned on stage in The Female Wits—not virulently, but as fat, greedy, and unladylike.
The cast-list of The Female Wits, unpublished till 1704, suggests that...
During her London years she was an ally of Damaris Masham
, but quarrelled with Delarivier Manley
. She found both a patron and a friend in Sarah, Lady Piers
(who wrote poetry herself). She...
Friends, Associates
Sarah Fyge
Manley
had been a friend of SF
, but they came to dislike each other by 1704-5.
Friends, Associates
Sarah, Lady Piers
SLP
was in correspondence with Catharine Trotter
from at least 1697 to 1709 (the year after Trotter's marriage). The relationship was warm: when Trotter, now Cockburn, was married and expecting her first child, Piers hoped...
Timeline
About 1349-1351
Giovanni Boccaccio
worked at his cycle of tales entitled (from the fact that the stories are told over the course of ten days) the Decameron. It was first translated into English in 1620.
1669
G. J. Guilleragues
published, anonymously, Lettres portugaises (sometimes called Letters of a Portuguese Nun).
1705-14
Robert Harley
worked to establish a nationwide system of government intelligence and propaganda.
2 April 1705
Bernard Mandeville
published The Grumbling Hive (later expanded as The Fable of the Bees).
8 July 1709-31 March 1710
The thrice-weekly Female Tatler appeared, an explicitly woman-centred riposte to the condescending or gender-prejudiced element in Richard Steele
's still-new Tatler.
3 August 1710
The Examiner, or, Remarks upon Papers and Occurrences was launched by Jonathan Swift
with the express intention of examining and correcting false statements from other periodicals; it ran until 1716
A proposal was published for a series or periodical to be entitled The Weekly Novelist, a Collection of the Best Novels.
16 October 1750-April 1753
Christopher Smart
and John Newbery
, under the persona of Mary Midnight, issued a periodical entitled The Midwife; or, Old Woman's Magazine; they acknowledge the influence of Delarivier Manley
.
By 1761
Harris's List of Covent-garden Ladies: Or, New Atlantis, a directory of prostitutes, was being printed annually under this title.
1814
John Colin Dunlop
published The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age.