Delarivier Manley

In January 1694 Manley left her husband and went to live with Barbara Villiers, the 1st Duchess of Cleveland, at one time the mistress of Charles II.

Manley became well-known, even notorious, as a novelist with the publication of her roman à clef the New Atalantis in 1709,[7] a work that spotted present British politics on the fabulous Mediterranean Island.

Contemporary critics like Swift might consider that her caricatures missed the mark much more often than they hit it;[8] but a historian like G. M. Trevelyan would at least rate her portrait of Godolphin as a telling one: "...the greatest genius of his age with the least of it in his aspect.

She had discredited half the arena of ruling Whig politicians, as well as moderate Tories like John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, who, she said, had begun his career at court in the bed of the royal mistress, Barbara Villiers.

Manley resolutely denied all correspondencies between her characters and real people, and the charges were eventually dropped:[7] part of the difficulty of those offended was proving that she had actually told their stories, without exposing themselves to further ridicule.

[11] The result was a tacit agreement as to the fictional status of her works, under cover of which she continued to publish another volume of the Atalantis and two more of the Memoirs of Europe.

In this work, Manley has been seen as repositioning herself politically as a more moderate figure, in preparation for the power shifts to come;[14] and it may be significant that it was a Whig, Richard Steele, who was later to produce her lucrative drama Lucius in 1717.

[15] Her last major work, The Power of Love in Seven Novels (London: J. Barber/ J. Morphew, 1720), was a revised version of selected novellas first published in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure well furnished with pleasaunt Histories and excellent Novelles (1566).

Her body was interred in the middle aisle of the Church of St Benet at Paul's-Wharf, where on a marble gravestone is the following inscription to her memory: "Here lieth the body of Mrs. Delarivier Manley, Daughter of Sir Roger Manley, Knight, Who, suitable to her birth and education, Was acquainted with several Parts of Knowledge, And with the most polite Writers, both in the French and English tongue.

Her precarious marriage past, numerous quarrels, her obesity and her politics were topics that she sold in constant revisions of the fame she had acquired.

Almyna, her dramatic adaptation of The Arabian Nights Entertainments also found itself entangled in controversy by Anne Bracegirldle's retirement from the stage and the high cost of the production.

[21] Later critics, however, looked back on the conclusions of Richetti and others as short-sighted and perhaps even outright misogynistic and more reflective of their era than of general historic scholarship on the author as an important political satirist.

The more accessible edition of The New Atalantis, which Rosalind Ballaster turned into a Penguin Classic, brought Manley wider recognition among students of early 18th-century literature.