Mary Pix

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MP , writing and publishing at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, was the most prolific female playwright since Behn . Her comedies, full of fun and acute observation of human vagaries, depend more on stagecraft, situation, and plotting than on verbal wit, and are unusually sympathetic to the non-upper classes. As well as both comedies and tragedies, MP wrote poems and a novel.
Painting of Mary Pix by an unknown artist, c. 1690. She wears a beige gown, loose and low on her bare shoulders, and a brown shawl. National Portrait Gallery.

Milestones

1666

Mary Griffith (later MP ) was born at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire.
Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago.
413

1688

MP first appeared in print, with commendatory lines she had written to preface Richard Ames 's pseudonymous Sylvia's Revenge; or, A Satyr against Man.
Clark, Constance. Three Augustan Women Playwrights. Peter Lang.
185
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

17 October 1696

MP 's farce or comedy The Spanish Wives was published.
The London Stage 1660-1800. Southern Illinois University Press.
1: 464

1 May 1707

MP published A Poem, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Lords Commissioners for the Union of the Two Kingdoms: her final appearance in print.
Foxon, David F. English Verse 1701-1750. Cambridge University Press.

By 19 May 1709

MP had died; this was the day of her funeral.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Family

1666

Mary Griffith (later MP ) was born at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire.
Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago.
413

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