Mary Davys - Life Account

Life Account

Born in Ireland, she married Peter Davys, master of the free school of St Patrick's, Dublin, and had two daughters both of whom seem to have died in infancy. After being widowed she moved to London in 1700 in order to make a living.

She published The Amours of Alcippus and Lucippe in 1704 but did not have a second publication until The Northern Heiress, a comedy critical of the marriage market. Initially produced in York in 1715, it debuted in London in 1716 at Lincoln's Inn Fields and she bought a coffeehouse in Cambridge with the proceeds and to support herself.

Davys is best known, however, for her novels: The Reform'd Coquet is a successful early example of the novel of education, and her Familiar Letters, an epistolary novel which satirised the upper classes, preceded those of Richardson. Her writing is often direct, even blunt: for example, the main character in The accomplish'd rake, a debauched womanizer, is presented without euphemism. She was attacked in The Grub-Street Journal in 1731 for being "bawdy" but she "replied with vigour." She lived in Cambridge until her death after a period of ill health.