Delarivier Manley: Playwright, Satirist, and Novelist

Delarivier Manley (died 11 July 1724)

As with her her contemporary, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley's "life" is known to us mainly by her own fictionalized version of it. 

In her best-selling The New Atalantis (1709) and in The Adventures of Rivella; or, The History of the Author of the Atalantis (1714), Manley reveals that she was born (probably around 1670) in "Hampshire, in one of those islands which formerly belonged to France, where her father was governor."

Delarivier Manley was born on the island of Jersey, where her father, Sir Roger Manley, had been appointed lieutenant governor (by the actual governor, Sir Thomas Morgan) on 25 Oct. 1667. (The Isle of Wight was considered at one time part of the English county of Hampshire--perhaps that's why Manley named the island of her birth as Hampshire.)

In addition to serving as lieutenant governor, Sir Roger was a royalist soldier and the author of several histories, including a posthumously published History of the Rebellion (1691) about the English Civil War. 

Nothing is known about Delarivier's mother, though she may have been named Mary Catherine. Manley would later write that she lost her mother when she was "very young."  In the persona of Delia, Manley claims that she was educated at home, that she developed a passion for a soldier she met in 1685, and that, as a result, she was sent to spend time with her brother in the home of a Huguenot minister, where she became fluent in French. She also claims that she had the opportunity of becoming a maid of honor to Mary of Modena, the wife of James II, in December of 1687. 

Perhaps she missed the opportunity because her father had died a few months earlier, and Manley was sent into the care of an "old out-of-fashion aunt" who promptly died. She was then transferred to the care of her cousin, the lawyer John Manley (he was the son of her father's brother, also named John Manley); he "married" Delarivier--bigamously, because he already had a wife, Anne Grosse, a Cornish heiress whom he had married in 1679.

In The New Atalantis, she would describe herself as not quite fourteen, "a prisoner" in a "guilty house." After he had squandered his new "wife's" fortune and their relationship produced a child, a boy named John, John Manley returned to his legal wife. 

By 1694, Manley had found her way into the household of Barbara Villiers, duchess of Cleveland, but whether she had run away from her "husband" or been deserted by him is not clear. (Delarivier may not be altogether--or even very--truthful about her relationship with John since there is some evidence she may later have reunited with him and given birth to a second child.)

About Delarivier's status in the Villiers household, Bernadette Andrea writes that she "may have been serving as a companion to one of Charles II's cast-off mistresses, perhaps becoming a mistress to wealthy men herself, maybe engaging in some dubious schemes at blackmail. . . ."

Whatever the situation, six months later Manley was "expelled" from the duchess's household for having "flirted" with the duchess's son. However unfortunate, this expulsion led to her career as a professional writer. By July she had completed her first play, The Lost Lover; or, The Jealous Husband, A Comedy, produced on stage and published two years later. Later that year, The Royal Mischief, a tragedy, was staged.

She contributed to The Nine Muses, a volume of poetry by women, in 1700, and a novel, Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians, was published in 1705 (though her authorship of this anonymously published work has been questioned, it is included in Ros Ballaster's 2009 entry on Manley in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).  

The tragedy Almyna, or the Arabian Vow was performed in 1706 and published the next year. In 1709, as we have noted, she published The Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes, from the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean--a heady and scandalous mixture of fact and fiction, gossip, politics, and autobiography. Immensely popular, the novel went through seven editions by 1736. After a second volume was added, she was briefly imprisoned, but once discharged, she promptly published volumes three and four as Memoirs of Europe towards the Close of the Eighth Century (1710) and Court Intrigues (1711).

Manley also wrote political satire for the Tories, edited several numbers of Jonathan Swift's Examiner (1710 and 1711), and published a series of political pamphlets: A True Narrative of what Pass'd at the Examination of the Marquis of Guiscard (1711), A Learned Comment on Dr. Hare's Sermon (1711), and The Honour and Prerogative of the Queen's Majesty Vindicated (1713). 

She published The Adventures of Rivella, as noted, in 1714. One more play, Lucius: The First Christian King of Britain, was produced in 1717. In The Power of Love: In Seven Novels (1720), adapted French and Italian stories from a sixteenth-century English edition, she creates something fresh for her readers; as Ballaster notes, "Manley thoroughly transforms her sources to make them relevant to contemporary contexts and debates, delivers racy plotting, and panders to her readers' voyeurism,"

For the last years of her life, Delarivier Manley lived with the printer John Barber. She died of a "cholic" at his printing house on 11 July 1724. Her will asks that all her unpublished work be destroyed so that "none Ghost-like may walk after my decease."

If you have access to the Dictionary of National Biography (online), Bassater's biographical essay is excellent, but if you don't, you can find an earlier DNB entry for Delarivier here, via Google Books. There are used copies of a Penguin edition of The New Atalantis (very expensive!), but also a very affordable new paperback edition of The Adventures of Rivella. Manly's The Royal Mischief is in Bernadette Andrea's English Women Staging Islam, 1696-1707.

And, by the way, along with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley was praised as "the fair triumvirate of wit."

Aphra Behn: She Made Her Living by Writing

Aphra Behn (died 16 April 1689)

Aphra Behn's life is every bit as filled with adventure as the plot of her most popular play, The Rover--at least in Behn's own telling or, rather, tellings, of her life story.

What was her "real" name? Was her father a barber or a gentleman? Did she really travel to Surinam--the setting of much of her most famous novella, Oronooko--and meet an African prince? Did she marry the man whose name she would use, Behn, throughout her literary career? 

Aphra Behn in a 1670 portrait
by Peter Lely

So many details about Behn's life are unknown or unclear or obscure. Indeed, in a roundtable discussion on Aphra Behn at the Sorbonne in 1999, Germaine Greer referred to the early-modern writer as a "palimpsest," that is, a writing surface with its text erased and reused, then erased and written on again, each rewriting leaving traces of what had been written before. Only, Greer noted, Behn was the one who had "scratched herself out." 

While Behn may (or may not) have been born in 1640, thrown into debtor's prison, or been a Catholic, what is known is that she was an English spy in Antwerp, began working for two theatrical companies, the King's Company and the Duke's Company, as a copyist, and then, in 1670, began to write.

Not only did she write, but she wrote a play, The Forc'd Marriage, a play that was produced. Unlike many early-modern women writers whom we will meet later this year--writers like Margaret Cavendish, for example--Behn wrote plays that would be staged, that attracted audiences, that would earn her money--and that, most importantly,  would earn her a place in literary history.

From 1670 until her death, Behn made a living with her pen. She wrote and published volumes of poetry, nineteen plays, and several works of fiction, shorter and longer. Her novella Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave, A True History, with its transnational and transatlantic appeal and its exploration of race and the horrors of slavery, is now the most widely read of her prose works, but the three-volume epistolary novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister is her most extensive prose work--the first volume a scandalous (and thus hugely popular) roman à clef.

Behn's output also includes translation, for example her 1688 A Discovery of New Worlds, an English version of the French writer Bernard le Bovier de Fonatenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondese, a popular work of science, in the form of a literary dialogue, explaining Copernican theory and speculating about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. At the time of her death, she was working on an English translation of poet Abraham Cowley's Latin Plantarum libri sex, six books on plants.

Although she died in poverty, Behn left women a rich inheritance. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf notes that the notoriety of Aphra Behn was used to warn women away from attempting to live the life of a writer. "Death would be better!" these imagined scolders claimed. But Woolf does not condemn Behn for the life she led. Behn had, by "some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote." And, finally, Woolf offers a memorable tribute to Behn: 

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, . . . for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she--shady and amorous as she was--who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you to-night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

There are many affordable and accessible editions of Behn's two most popular works, Oroonoko and the wonderful comedy with three adventurous women looking for love, or at least marriage, The Rover. Aside from these two works, it's easy enough to read further--free Kindle versions are available of most of Behn's work, and you can find her plays and fiction online at sites like Project Gutenberg.

I also recommend Janet Todd's excellent biography, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. Todd is particularly good on Behn's politics--like many of the earliest women writers in England, Margaret Cavendish, Delarivier Manly, and Mary Astell,* for example--Behn was politically conservative.

For a great introduction to Behn's life and work, if you're not ready for Todd's full-length biography, there is an excellent treatment of Behn at The Poetry Foundation--biographical information, critical assessment of her work, a complete bibliography, and suggestions for further reading; to access, click here.

You may find that the best introduction to Aphra Behn--or a great supplement, if you are a Behn enthusiast--is the discussion on Melvyn Bragg's BBC Radio 4 program, In Our Time. To listen to the podcast, click here.

Should you be of a mind to "let flowers fall upon [her] tomb," Behn is buried in Wesminster Abbey.

*For Margaret Cavendish, click here; for Delarivier Manly, click here; and for Mary Astell, click here.