Mary de la Rivière Manley

English political writer

• Born: c. 1670
• Birthplace: Jersey
• Died: July 11, 1724
• Place of death: London, England

Manley, the first professional female political propagandist in England, supported herself by editing Tory journals and writing novels, plays, poems, and pamphlets. Her politically motivated writings satirized the illicit behavior of major political and court figures, leading to her arrest for libel. Her novel Zarah is considered one of English literature’s first romans à clef, a novel that features actual but disguised persons or events.

Early Life

Mary de la Rivière Manley (deh leh reev-yehr man-lee) was the fourth of five children born to Sir Roger Manley and his wife. Some sources cite a birth year of 1663, but documents drafted during Mary’s lifetime and the recorded details of her father’s life make1670 a more likely birth date. An older sister named Mary Elizabeth may account for the confusion.

Roger Manley, whose family roots date to William the Conqueror, was knighted by King James I in 1628 and appointed governor of the Channel Islands in 1667. He served in the English navy and honored his commanding officer’s wife by giving the uncommon Delarivier name to his own daughter.

Little is known about Mary’s mother, other than that she died when the family’s two smallest children were quite young. Roger died in 1687, leaving his first cousin, John Manley, guardian of Mary and her younger sister, Cordelia; John boarded them with an elderly aunt. The Glorious Revolution occurred the next year, resulting in the deposition of King James II and spoiling Mary’s anticipated rise as lady-in-waiting to the king’s wife, Mary of Modena.

In 1688 or 1694, John Manley announced that his wife had died. He then married Mary, who was his cousin, and sequestered her in London. Upon learning Mary was pregnant, he confessed that his first wife was alive and so abandoned Mary less than three years later. Mary’s marriage with John, a close relative, left her disgraced and without economic support. She resided with a former mistress of Charles II for about six months and relied possibly on the largesse of a wealthy man until she began supporting herself through writing.

Life’s Work

Mary de la Rivière Manley produced a tremendous number of plays and political writings. During a twenty-one-year period, English theatergoers saw four of her plays performed on the stage. The Lost Lover: Or, The Jealous Husband played at London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 1696. The comedy flopped. Soon after, The Royal Mischief (1696) ran for six nights at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Although considered a success, the tragedy gained notoriety for its sexually charged subject matter and became the basis for The Female Wits, an anonymously authored play ridiculing Manley and two other women playwrights.

About ten years later, in 1706, Alymna: Or, The Arabian Vow played at the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket. The feminist drama closed after only three nights, a victim of strong competition from the opera house and a lavish production that drove up ticket prices. Manley’s final play may have been her most successful, but there is some dispute as to whether Lucius, The First Christian King of Britain: A Tragedy ran for just three performances or played a profitable fifteen-night run. Shown at Drury Lane in 1717, the drama eschews inflammatory political and feminist subjects in favor of a more “respectable” plot.

The work that propelled Manley to fame, however, was the novel she wrote in 1709 called Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean. The political allegory, constructed as a conversation between three female spies, became the best-selling novel of the decade. Secret Memoirs and Manners and subsequent volumes in the series pillory notable Whig personalities from Charles II to Queen Anne.

Within two weeks of the release of the second volume, in October of 1709, Manley was arrested for libel, along with her printer and publishers. Four months later, after successfully defending against the charges, the author was set free. She immediately began penning the third volume of the series.

Manley had already proven herself a formidable political propagandist prior to Secret Memoirs and Manners. She wrote polemical Tory pamphlets beginning in 1704, and she published The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians in 1705. The book chronicles Zarah’s (Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough) rise to power and vilifies other prominent Whigs along the way. Scholars acknowledge The Secret History as one of the first romans à clef in English literature.

The Female Tatler was launched in response to the literary periodical the Tatler in 1709, and Manley probably edited the first year’s issues under the pseudonym Mrs. Crackenthorpe. In 1711, she replaced Jonathan Swift as editor of The Examiner, a Tory paper dedicated to abusing the Whig Party and its proponents. She was employed by Swift as a pamphlet writer around the same time. In 1714, Manley publicly retired as a political writer, but her continued prolific output proved the statement disingenuous.

Also in 1714, Manley issued her fictionalized autobiography, The Adventures of Rivella: Or, The History of the Author of the Atalantis, under the pen name Sir Charles Lovemore. The book tells the story of Manley’s life and is supposedly the posthumous translation into English of a conversation between Lovemore and a young Frenchman. The book barely discusses Manley’s writing career and instead focuses on the personal events that shaped her life. Manley’s early biographers tended to accept the autobiography as truth, but later scholars have approached it more cautiously.

The Adventures of Rivella recounts Manley’s unfortunate marriage to her first cousin, John Manley, as well as numerous other amorous liaisons. Her relationship with John Tilly, the love of her life, fills a considerable number of pages. Although Tilly was married, the pair lived together openly from about 1696 to 1702 and may have had a child together. They engaged in a number of ill-conceived business projects, including alchemy, leaving them in a sorry financial state. When Tilly’s wife died in 1702, he married a wealthy widow (reputedly with Manley’s blessing), went insane, and died in 1709.

Sometime around 1710 or 1711, Manley moved in with printer John Barber. She wrote The Adventures of Rivella during this time and published it with a rival printer. Barber is never mentioned in the book, and he eventually took up with another woman. Manley died soon thereafter, in 1724.

Significance

Mary de la Rivière Manley is best known for writing scandalous political novels and for flouting social convention. However, this characterization fails to recognize the substantial power she exercised in the English political arena. As one of the first English writers to exploit the press for political ends, Manley figured prominently in the development of scandal reporting as a political weapon. Her works, especially those penned between 1709 and 1711, publicized the vices and illicit behavior of such luminaries as Charles II and Sarah Churchill. Manley’s ability to influence public opinion proved such a threat to her political foes, leading to her arrest for libel in 1709.

Being characterized as a writer of the scandalous also overlooks Manley’s important place in feminist history. She was able to utilize the press to advance feminist causes, and she openly criticized the social and sexual double standards of her time. She employed her writing as a defense against gender-biased criticism and as a vehicle for promoting her personal interests and the interests of women in general. Her use of a consciously female narrative voice, and in particular the device of female conversation, impacted writers of her time and continues to influence feminist and political writing.

Bibliography

Anderson, Paul Bunyan. “Mary Delarivière, a Cavalier’s Daughter in Grub Street.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1931. A primary source for scholars of Manley, written by her chief biographer.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Mistress Delarivière Manley’s Biography.” Modern Philology 33 (1936): 261-278. A thoroughly researched and heavily footnoted account of Manley’s childhood, family history, and literary career.

Clark, Constance. Three Augustan Women Playwrights. New York: Peter Lang, 1986. The introduction to this work provides a social and theatrical context for Manley and other female playwrights. The chapter on Manley offers biographical details and considers the sources, influences, and critical reception of her plays and political writings. Includes a thorough synopsis of and critical response to her four performed plays.

Herman, Ruth. The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Analyzes Manley’s writing techniques and her significance as the first professional woman political journalist. Discusses her writing in its function as Tory propaganda. Includes some biographical information and an extensive bibliography.

McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. New York: Clarendon Press, 1998. Argues that dramatic shifts in English politics and literary production created an unprecedented opportunity for female political involvement, and that Manley’s writings and literary strategies exploited this phenomenon for political and personal ends.

Manley, Delarivier. The Adventures of Rivella. Edited by Katherine Zelinsky. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 1999. Manley’s fictionalized autobiography of her life. The introduction provides a social and literary context for the novel, and the appendices present texts and excerpts of text written by Manley and her contemporaries.