Delarivier Manley

Delarivier (sometimes spelt Delariviere, Delarivière or de la Rivière) Manley (1663 or c. 1670 – 24 July 1724) was an English author, playwright, and political pamphleteer. (Some outdated sources list her first name as Mary, but recent scholarship has demonstrated that to be an error; Mary was the name of one of her sisters, and she always referred to herself as Delarivier or Delia.)

Manley is sometimes referred to, with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, as one of "the fair triumvirate of wit", which is a later attribution.

Much of what is known about Manley is rooted in her insertion of "Delia's story" in the New Atalantis (1709) and the Adventures of Rivella that she published as the biography of the author of the Atalantis with Edmund Curll in 1714. Curll added further details on the publication history behind the Rivella in the first posthumous edition of the quasi-fictional and not entirely-reliable autobiography in 1725.

Manley was probably born in Jersey, the third of six children of Sir Roger Manley, a royalist army officer and historian, and a woman from the Spanish Netherlands, who died when Delarivier was young. It seems that she and her sister, Cornelia, moved with their father to his various army postings.

After their father's death in 1687, the young women became wards of their cousin, John Manley (1654–1713), a Tory MP. John Manley had married a Cornish heiress and, later, bigamously, married Delarivier. They had a son in 1691, also named John. 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. She remained there only six months, at which time she was expelled by the duchess for allegedly flirting with her son. There is some indication that she may have been by then reconciled with her husband, for a time.

From 1694 to 1696, Manley travelled extensively in England, principally in the southwest, and began her dramatic career. At this time she wrote her first play, a comedy, The Lost Lover, or, The Jealous Husband (1696) and the she-tragedy, The Royal Mischief (1696), which became the subject of ridicule and inspired the anonymous satirical play, The Female Wits. The satire mocked three female playwrights, including Manley, Catharine Trotter, and Mary Pix. Manley retired from the stage for ten years before returning with her 1707 play, Almyna, or, The Arabian Vow. Ten years later, Manley's Lucius, The First King of Britain, was staged.

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