Susanna Centlivre

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Standard Name: Centlivre, Susanna
Birth Name: Susanna Freeman
Married Name: Susanna Rawkins
Married Name: Susanna Carroll
Married Name: Susanna Centlivre
Married Name: Susanna Ustick
Married Name: Susanna Fox
Pseudonym: Astraea
Pseudonym: Mrs D. E.
Pseudonym: The Author of The Gamester
Used Form: Mrs Cent-Livre
Used Form: Mrs Centlivre
Used Form: R. M.
Used Form: the author of The Gamester and Love's Contrivance
SC was a versatile professional writer of the early eighteenth century, who used many genres (poetry, letters, possibly journalism), but whose fame rests on her comedies. Of fourteen of these (including adaptations), several held their place in the repertory for a century or more.

Connections

Connections Sort ascending Author name Excerpt
Wealth and Poverty Mary Pix
Just over a week after MP died, a performance of Susanna Centlivre 's The Busie Body was given for the benefit of her executor (indirectly, therefore, for her family).
Lyons, Paddy, and Fidelis Morgan, editors. Female Playwrights of the Restoration: Five Comedies. J. M. Dent.
xviii
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Theodora Benson
In 1951 TB returned to partnership with Bentley though not with Askwith in a different treatment of famous people, London Immortals in Allan Wingate 's The Londoners' Library series. This goes through London street by...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay , she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Seymour Montague
The third epistle performs the conventional act of praising historical women: the monarchs Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great of Russia for their exercise of power, the French scholar Anne Dacier , and eleven British...
Textual Production Mary Pix
MP supported Susanna Centlivre in the early stages of the latter's career, and may even have had a hand in her greatest hit, The Busie Body, 1709.
Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago.
414
Textual Production Clemence Dane
The tale of Covent Garden begins with Inigo Jones 's building there in the 1630s of the first London square, prototype for many more. CD throws together a colourful account of its local characters and...
Textual Production Mary Davys
MD may have written An Answer from the King of Sweden to the British Lady's Epistle, in response to a poem by Susanna Centlivre .
Bowden, Martha F., and Mary Davys. “Introduction”. The Reform’d Coquet; or, Memoirs of Amoranda; Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady; and, The Accomplish’d Rake; or, Modern Fine Gentleman, University Press of Kentucky, p. ix - xlix.
xx
Textual Production Sarah Fyge
SF published her Poems on Several Occasions, with prefatory verses probably by Mary Pix and Susanna Centlivre .
This text is available on line from the Women Writers Project , www.wwp.northeastern.edu.
Foxon, David F. English Verse 1701-1750. Cambridge University Press.
Bowyer, John Wilson. The Celebrated Mrs Centlivre. Duke University Press.
31-2
Textual Production Sarah Gardner
The sub-title repeats and reverses the title of Susanna Centlivre 's A Bold Stroke for a Wife, 1718. SG said she wrote this play not from vanity or desire of applause but a view...
Textual Features May Crommelin
The story opens as Irene Ronaldson receives the news that she has inherited a fortune of twenty thousand pounds a year.
“May Crommelin (Maria Henriette de la Cherois-Crommelin) (1849 - 1930)”. Crommelin Family, The Netherlands.
Irene is an orphan: her father lost everything in a bank crash, went out...
Textual Features Alexander Pope
The play is remarkable among its other fun for a minor characater, Phoebe Clinket, an unhinged woman poet. She was wrongly identified in Edward Parker 's Key as Anne Finch , a mistake which has...
Textual Features Mary Robinson
To demonstrate, as well as arguing for, mental equality, MR learnedly surveys the course of political and literary history. She honours many women writers of the past (Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre as well...
Textual Features Jane Austen
The plot of this novel is a version of a romance archetype: poor but deserving girl confounds all expectations by marrying up. Elizabeth Bennet is the quintessence of the witty and resourceful heroine who had...
Textual Features Elizabeth Boyd
EB offers original, discriminating praise for women's writing: Susanna Centlivre (her inspiration, she says), Eliza Haywood (though she regrets her exposure of women's faults), Aphra Behn , and Delarivier Manley , whom she calls the...
Textual Features Elizabeth Inchbald
EI did not choose the plays herself. Shakespeare fills the first five volumes, apart from one piece by Ben Jonson , and five of her own plays fill volume 20. The eighteenth century is better...

Timeline

8 July 1709-31 March 1710: The thrice-weekly Female Tatler appeared,...

Women writers item

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.

6 December 1718: Nicholas Rowe, playwright, translator, and...

Writing climate item

6 December 1718

Nicholas Rowe , playwright, translator, and editor of Shakespeare , died after four years in the post of Poet Laureate.

19 May 1720: A New Miscellany, edited by Anthony Hammond,...

Women writers item

19 May 1720

A New Miscellany, edited by Anthony Hammond , included work by Pope , Prior , William Bond , George Sewell , Susanna Centlivre , Delarivier Manley , Eliza Haywood , Martha Fowke , and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu .

24 April 1769: Kitty Clive gave her farewell performance....

Building item

24 April 1769

Kitty Clive gave her farewell performance. She had enjoyed great success as a comic actress, and some as a playwright.

23 September 1782: Covent Garden Theatre re-opened after a three-month...

Building item

23 September 1782

Covent Garden Theatre re-opened after a three-month reconstruction, enlargement, and renovation.

1994: Juggernaut was set up as a small New York...

Women writers item

1994

Juggernaut was set up as a small New York theatre company; in 2001 it decided to publicise the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women playwrights.

27 October 2009: In Washington, DC, the National Museum of...

Women writers item

27 October 2009

In Washington, DC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Washington Shakespeare Company together launched a Sort-of-Jane-Austen Play Reading Festival presenting women playwrights.

Texts

Centlivre, Susanna. A Bickerstaff’s Burying. Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1710.
Centlivre, Susanna. A Bold Stroke for a Wife. W. Mears, J. Browne, and F. Clay, 1718.
Centlivre, Susanna. A Poem. Humbly Presented to His Most Sacred Majesty George. T. Woodward, 1715.
Centlivre, Susanna. A Wife Well Manag’d. Printed and sold by S. Keimer, 1715.
Centlivre, Susanna. A Woman’s Case. E. Curll, 1720.
Centlivre, Susanna. An Epistle to Mrs. Wallup. R. Burleigh and A. Boulter, 1715.
Centlivre, Susanna. An Epistle to the King of Sweden. Printed for J. Roberts . and Arabella Morris, 1717.
Centlivre, Susanna. Love at a Venture. John Chantry, 1706.
Centlivre, Susanna. Love’s Contrivance. Bernard Lintott, 1703.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Artifice. T. Payne, 1723.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Basset Table. Printed for William Turner . and sold by J. Nutt, 1706.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Beau’s Duel. Printed for D. Brown . and N. Cox, 1702.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Busie Body. Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1709.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Cruel Gift. Printed for E. Curl . and A. Bettesworth, 1717.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Gamester. Printed for William Turner . and William Davis, 1705.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Gotham Election. Printed and sold by S. Keimer, 1715.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Man’s Bewitch’d. Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1709.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Masquerade. Bernard Lintott, 1713.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Perjur’d Husband. Bennet Banbury, 1700.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Perplex’d Lovers. Printed for Owen Lloyd, 1712.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Platonick Lady. Printed for James Knapton . . . and Egbert Sanger, 1707.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Stolen Heiress. Printed for William Turner . and John Nutt, 1703.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Wonder. E. Curll, 1714.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Works of the Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre. J. Knapton, 1761.