Delarivier Manley - Biography

Biography

Much of our knowledge about Delarivier Manley is rooted in her insertion of "Delia's story" in the New Atalantis (1709), and the Adventures of Rivella 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 girls 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.

During the period of 1694–1696 Manley travelled extensively in England, principally in the south-west. At this time she wrote her first play, a comedy, The Lost Lover, or, The Jealous Husband (1696). There is some indication that she may have been by then reconciled with her husband, for a time.

Manley's satirical attacks on the Whigs at one point resulted in payment from the then Prime Minister Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. Her career as an author effectively began with the publication of her New Atalantis in 1709, a work that spotted present British politics on the fabulous Mediterranean Island. Manley was immediately questioned by the authorities in preparation of a libel case against her. She had discredited half the arena of ruling Whig politicians—John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, who, she said, had begun his career at court in the bed of the then royal mistress, Barbara Villiers. Manley answered the authorities, so her Adventures of Rivella, insisting that her work was entirely fictional. Whigs who felt offended should prove that she had actually told their stories. The result was a silent agreement over the preferable fictional status of her works under which she continued to publish another volume of the Atalantis and two more of the Memoirs of Europe. The latter found a different fictional setting to allow the wider European picture. Later editions sold the Memoirs, however, as volumes three and four of the Atalantis. The Atalantis was not only the attractive work to embrace the Memoirs; it sparked several imitations and persuaded the publishers to sell the Secret History of Queen Zarah, an anonymous work that had appeared four years earlier as an "appendix" to the New Atalantis.

In 1714 Manley had almost suffered the misfortune of becoming the object of a biographical text planned by Charles Gildon. Curll, Gildon's prospective publisher warned Manley of the work in progress. She contacted Gildon and arranged for an agreement: she would write the work in question herself within a certain time span. The result were her Adventures of Rivella, a book evolving between two male protagonists: The young chevalier D'Aumont has left France to have sex with the authoress, he finds a rejected lover and friend who does not only offer his assistance in arranging the contact but who also the story of her life, both as related in public gossip and as only her friends know it.

Manley temporally joined Jonathan Swift as co-author of The Examiner. Her last major work, The Power of Love in Seven Novels (London: J. Barber/ J. Morphew, 1720) is a revised version of selected novellas first published in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure well furnished with pleasaunt Histories and excellent Novelles (1566).

Manley died at Barber's Printing House, on Lambeth Hill, after a violent fit of the cholic which lasted five days. 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.

This Accomplishment,

Together with a greater Natural Stock of Wit, made her Conversation agreeable to all who knew Her, and her Writings to be universally Read with Pleasure.

She died July 11th, 1724."