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.
EH
's socio-political allegory stands virtually alone in her oeuvre in its attempt to reproduce the political instrumentality of Manley
's scandal fiction during the reign of Anne.
Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms. Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Clarendon Press.
EH
's preface defends the moral effects of realistic fiction, of imperfect heroes and heroines drawn with faults as well as virtues, without poetical descriptions or rhapsodic dialogue.
Spedding, Patrick. A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. Pickering and Chatto.
517
Her publisher specifically commissioned her to...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Herberts
This tale is not continuous, but distributed in sections throughout the book. The romance couples make periodic contact with the Countess Brillante, a woman writer about whom Herbert's attitude is typically protean and hard to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Lennox
The novel's opening is an early example of a technique which was to remain popular with authors for generations: About the middle of July 17 — . . . , where the precise day and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Docile her longest work of prose fiction, is also autobiographical in its scarifying yet comic account of the naive and idealistic Docile's repeated victimisation. Endowed with perfect docility as a fairy gift, educated first by...
Intertextuality and Influence
Laetitia Pilkington
LP
was vividly aware of the literary handicap represented by her gender. But she was choosy about claiming influence. She decried Manley
, Haywood
, and Mary Barber
(whose poems, she says, would have been...
Textual Production
Mary Pix
MP
contributed commendatory verses to Delarivier Manley
on her The Royal Mischief.
Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago.
414-15
The London Stage 1660-1800. Southern Illinois University Press.
1: 461
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...
MP
contributed to The Nine Muses, edited by Delarivier Manley
in 1700, a volume of elegies by women on the lately-dead John Dryden
.
Backscheider, Paula R., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 80. Gale Research.
174
Literary responses
Mary Pix
Jane Spencer
points out that modern criticism has not been appreciative of MP
: Jacqueline Pearson
has said that she deals in conventional male stereotypes and gives women no more air time than do male...
Textual Features
Clara Reeve
CR
demonstrates the widest possible reading: from Homer
, Virgil
and Horace
(all revered) and Juvenal
and Persius
(used to prove that not all classical authors are admirable) through the heroic romances like those of...
Textual Features
Regina Maria Roche
London Tales; or, Reflective Portraits includes a story called The Vacant Novel Reader, whose protagonist, Evelina, is so addicted to novels that her father fears she will never be happy among human beings as...
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 et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
