Delarivier Manley - Reception

Reception

Delarivier Manley lived on the fame of her notorious personality as early as 1714. Her precarious marriage past, numerous quarrels, her obesity, her political stance were topics she sold in constant revisions of the fame she had acquired. This was apparently no problem before the 1740s—Manley was translated into French and German in the early 18th century, and received new English editions during the first half of the century. Alexander Pope satirised the eternal fame she was about to acquire in his Rape of the Lock in 1712—it would last "as long as the Atalantis shall be read."

The revision of her fame and status as an author began in the early decades of the 18th century and led to manifest defamations in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Manley became a scandalous female author, one of those whom some critics audaciously asserted did not deserve to be ever read again. Later critics, however, looked back on the conclusions of Richetti and others as not merely short-sighted, but perhaps even outright misogynistic and more reflective of their era than of general historic scholarship on the author as an important political satirist.

Manley's present re-appreciation began with Patricia Köster's ground breaking edition of her works. The more accessible edition of The New Atalantis, which Rosalind Ballaster turned into a Penguin Classic, brought Manley wider recognition among students of early eighteenth-century literature. Janet Todd, Catherine Gallagher and Ros Ballaster provided the perspective of Manley as a proto-feminist. Fidelis Morgan's, A Woman of No Character. An Autobiography of Mrs. Manley (London, 1986) put the (auto-)biographical information into the first more coherent picture. More recent critics such as Rachel Carnell and Ruth Herman have professionalized her biography and provided standardized scholarly editions.

Delarivier Manley has been erroneously claimed to have written The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705). This was first doubted in Patricia Köster's edition of her works (which still included the title). The claim was openly rejected by Olaf Simons (2001) who re-read the wider context of early 18th century Atalantic novels. J. Alan Downie (2004) went a step further and cast light on the presumable author of the Queen Zarah: Dr Joseph Browne.