Mary Pix

Mary Pix (1666 – 17 May 1709) was an English novelist and playwright. Church records indicate that she lived in London, marrying George Pix, a merchant tailor from Hawkhurst, Kent in 1684. Baptismal records reveal that she had two sons, George (1689) and William (1691). It appears that George died in 1690.

Mary Griffith Pix was born in 1666, the daughter of a rector, musician and Headmaster of the Royal Latin School, Buckingham, Buckinghamshire; her father, Roger Griffith, died when she was very young, but Mary and her mother continued to live in the schoolhouse after his death. She was courted by her father's successor Thomas Dalby, but he left with the outbreak of smallpox in town, just one year after the mysterious fire that burned the schoolhouse. Rumour had it that Mary and Dalby had been making love rather energetically and overturned a candle which set fire to the bedroom.

At the age of 18, Mary Griffith married George Pix, a merchant, in 1684 and moved to his country estate in Kent. In 1690, her first son, George, died very young. The next year the couple moved to London and she gave birth to another son, William. 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.

Though from quite different backgrounds, Pix quickly became associated with two other playwrights who emerged in the same year: Delariviere Manley and Catherine Trotter. The three female playwrights attained enough public success that they were criticised in the form of an anonymous satirical play The Female Wits (1696). Mary Pix appears as "Mrs. Wellfed one that represents a fat, female author. A good rather sociable, well-matured companion that would not suffer martyrdom rather than take off three bumpers in a hand". She is depicted as an ignorant woman, though amiable and unpretentious. Pix is summarised as "foolish and openhearted".

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. They said of her that "she has boldly given us an essay of her talent … and not without success, though with little profit to herself". (Morgan, 1991: xii).

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