Mary Pix

As an admirer of Aphra Behn and colleague of Susanna Centlivre, Pix has been called "a link between women writers of the Restoration and Augustan periods".

She was courted by her father's successor Thomas Dalby, but he left with the outbreak of smallpox in town, one year after a fire that burned the schoolhouse.

In 1696, when Pix was thirty years old, she first emerged as a professional writer, publishing The Inhumane Cardinal; or, Innocence Betrayed, her first and only novel, as well as two plays, Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks and The Spanish Wives.

[5] Her first play was put on stage in 1696 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, near her house in London but when that same theatrical company performed The Female Wits, she moved to Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Though Pix's public reputation was not damaged and she continued writing after the plagiarism scandal, she stopped putting her name on her work and after 1699 she only included her name on one play, in spite of the fact that she is believed to have written at least seven more.

At the time of Mary Pix, "The ideal of the one-breadwinner family had not yet become dominant", whereas in 18th-century families it was normal for the woman to stay at home taking care of the children, house and servants, in Restoration England husband and wife worked together in familiar enterprises that sustained them both and female playwrights earned the same wage as their male counterparts.

[7] Morgan also points out that "till the close of the period, authorship was not generally advertised on playbills, nor always proclaimed when plays were printed", which made it easier for female authors to hide their identity so as to be more easily accepted among the most conservative audiences.

Pix's comedic work was lively and full of double plots, intrigue, confusion, songs, dances and humorous disguise.

"(Schlueter & Schlueter, 1998: 513)Although some contemporary women writers, like Aphra Behn, have been rediscovered, even the most specialised scholars have little knowledge of works by writers such as Catherine Trotter, Delarivier Manley or Mary Pix, despite the fact that plays like The Beau Defeated (1700), present with a wider range of female characters than plays written by men at the time.

[11] A production of The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich (or The Beau Defeated) played as part of the 2018 season at the Royal Shakespeare Company.