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.
Oval mezzotint of Susanna Centlivre by Peter Pelham, after D. Fermin, 1720. She gazes out of the picture to her right, wearing her hair brushed back in soft curls, with a lock falling on her shoulder. Her gown has a deep neckline with some white linen visible. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
Reception Aphra Behn
Nancy Copeland has observed in a recent study of Behn, Centlivre , and gender that adaptations of this play, by Eliza Haywood in A Wife to be Lett, 1723, and Hannah Cowley in A...
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...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Frances Burney
This novel adopts the point of view of an omniscient, often moralising, narrator. Its language has been often criticised as Johnson ian. It has in fact little in common with Johnson's style, though it betrays...
Intertextuality and Influence Hannah Cowley
A prologue refers to the chivalric ages, when nobody criticised women except men of learning who were unequal to fighting with their own sex. Today, it observes, such criticism is more widespread. The play's satire...
Literary responses Hannah Cowley
The Critical called The Belle's Stratagemthe best dramatic production of a female pen which has appeared since the days of Centlivre , to whom Mrs. Cowley is at least equal in fable and character...
Intertextuality and Influence Hannah Cowley
The action is set in Madrid. The title reverses the gender roles of Susanna Centlivre 's A Bold Stroke for a Wife. Of the paired heroines, Victoria reclaims her faithless husband, Carlos, by...
Literary responses Hannah Cowley
Anna Seward included HC among her seven celebrated Female Poets
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
59 (1789): 292
of the present day in April 1789. Recent critical comment on her includes an examination of her use of marriage law in...
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...
Occupation Edmund Curll
Curll was apprenticed sometime around 1697 to 1699, and set up in business for himself by early 1706.
Baines, Paul, and Pat Rogers. Edmund Curll, Bookseller. Clarendon Press.
12, 22
He became a particularly agile entrepreneur with a nose for new market niches and an...
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

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.