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."

Eliza Haywood and Mothers of the Novel

Eliza Haywood (died 25 February 1756)

Born about the year 1693, Eliza Heywood was one of the most popular and prolific writers of her time--about her first novel, Love in Excess, David Oakleaf observes that it is "the spectacularly successful first novel of a spectacularly successful novelist." Following its 1719-20 serial publication, Haywood produced a novel "on average every three months" throughout the 1720s.

An engraving of Haywood,
1725

All this was accomplished while Haywood was still active in her first career, acting. She had begun her career on the stage in Ireland in 1715. Within two years she was in London, ultimately ending up at the Haymarket Theatre, where she worked with Henry Fielding.

By the end of the decade, she was not only collaborating on an adaptation of his work (The Opera of Operas was a musical version of Fielding's play about Tom Thumb, Tragedy of Tragedies) but writing her own original plays, A Wife to be Left and Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburg. 

In the following decades, Haywood wrote criticism (her Companion to the Theatre, first published in 1735, went through seven editions in twenty years), essays, conduct books, political histories and satire, translations, and a monthly periodical, The Female Spectator, which appeared from 1744 to 1746.

In this first periodical to be written by a woman for women, Haywood, in the guise of distinctive literary personae, discussed marriage, education, and child-rearing, among other topics of interest to her female readers. She was working on a second periodical for women, The Young Lady, at the time of her death. According to Oakleaf, in the last issue of The Young Lady, Haywood apologizes to her readers, saying that "she is too ill to continue writing."

History was not kind to Eliza Haywood, however--while Defoe and Fielding were lionized as "fathers of the novel," writers like Haywood were forgotten. As Kirsten T. Saxton reminds us, however: 

. . . Eliza Haywood was a key player in the history of the British novel, and a leading figure in a brilliant and competitive London literary scene that included Johathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson. She came resoundingly to fame in 1719 with the publication of her first novel, Love in Excess, or the fatal enquiry, which, until the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740, was one of the three most popular works of eighteenth-century English fiction, an honor it shared with Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver's Travels (1726).

But now, after decades of work by feminist scholars, Haywood's writing is once more available to interested readers. You can find free digitized versions at various sites like Project Gutenberg or Google Books, and free or very low-cost reprints are available through Kindle Books.

There are many high-quality, relatively inexpensive editions available as well, which include excellent biographical information and critical analyses. I recommend the edition of Love in Excess by David Oakleaf (quoted above). And among the dozens of short stories, novellas, and novels, I recommend The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, which is also available in a terrific paperback edition.

Although new copies a bit pricey, Patricia Meyer Spacks's Selections from the Female Spectator offers an excellent introduction to the periodical literature of the eighteenth century, an assessment of Haywood's role as writer and publisher, and a wonderful sampling of Haywood's journalism. (Used copies are also available!)

For a critical assessment of Haywood, I recommend Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio's The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work.