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.
Read more about this topic: Mary Davys
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or account:
“Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)
“At length he would call to let us know where he was waiting for us with his canoe, when, on account of the windings of the stream, we did not know where the shore was, but he did not call often enough, forgetting that we were not Indians.... This was not because he was unaccommodating, but a proof of superior manners. Indians like to get along with the least possible communication and ado. He was really paying us a great compliment all the while, thinking that we preferred a hint to a kick.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)