Delarivier Manley

An early example of satirical political writing by a woman. The book, with its blend of politics and sexuality, is based on the public and private lives of prominent politicians and society figures of the time.

Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix were among the groundbreaking “female wits,” who debuted their original plays for the public stage in 1695–96. Two of these plays contain explicitly Islamicate themes. Manley’s The Royal Mischief expands on The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia(1686), and Pix’s Ibrahim draws on Rycaut’s History of the Turkish Empire (1687). Continuing this interest, Manley’s Almyna (1706–7) responds to the newly translated Arabian Nights Entertainments (1704–17), and Pix’s The Conquest of Spain (1705) engages the history of Islamic Spain recounted in The Life of the Most Illustrious Monarch Almanzor (1693). These plays have been modernized and annotated in this edition, most for the first time. This edition also includes appendices with excerpts from historical sources and a select bibliography.

Delarivier Manley is increasingly coming to the fore as a prominent figure in early eighteenth-century fiction, and The Adventures of Rivella in particular has been attracting attention not only as an important example of amatory fiction, but also as an early autobiographical novel. At one level, Sir Charles Lovemore tells the story of Rivella's life to his friend, the Chevalier d'Aumont; at another, Manley uses the male persona to portray herself as an unrivalled literary goddess of love, repudiating conventional equations of woman, writer, and whore, and refusing to confuse chastity with moral integrity.

An early example of satirical political writing by a woman. The book, with its blend of politics and sexuality, is based on the public and private lives of prominent politicians and society figures of the time.