Mary Pix - Life and Work

Life and Work

She was born in 1666, the daughter of a rector, musician and Headmaster of the Royal Latin School; her father Roger 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.

Mary Griffiths (her maiden name) married George Pix, a merchant, and moved to his country state in Kent. Her first son, George, died very young, but the next year they moved to London and she gave birth to another son, William. While living in London and when she was 30, she became a professional writer, with her tragedy Ibrahim (1695-6).

At first she associated herself with two other playwrights of the time, Delariviere Manley and Catherine Trotter, reaching a great success that granted them some criticism 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” (From The Female Wits, Morgan, 1981: 392). She is depicted as an ignorant woman, but amiable and unpretentious and she is summed up in the play as “foolish and openhearted” (From The Female Wits, Morgan, 1981: 392)

Her first play was put on stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1696, but when that same theatrical company performed The Female Wits she changed 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).

Her plays were mainly performed at Drury Lane, a theatre that was located very near her own house in London. One of her plays, The Deceiver Deceived (1697), was involved in a case of plagiarism with George Powell, who was accused of copying her play in his The Imposture Defeated (1697).

She was quite successful in her professional life, and most of her plays had a good reputation amongst the audience. Her tragedies were quite popular because she managed to mix extreme action with melting love scenes. But her best pieces are her comedies, with their lively and full of double plots, intrigues, confusion, songs, dances and disguises. An Encyclopaedia of British Women Writers (1998) points out that

Forced or unhappy marriages appear frequently and prominently in the comedies. Pix is not, however, writing polemics against the forced marriage but using it as a plot device and sentimentalizing the unhappily married person, who is sometimes rescued and married more satisfactorily. (Schlueter & Schlueter, 1998: 513)

Few of the female playwrights of Mary Pix’s time came from a theatrical background, and none came from the aristocracy: within a century, most successful actresses and female authors came from a familiar tradition of literature and theatre, but Mary Pix and her contemporaries came from outside this world and had little in common with one another apart from a love for literature and a middle-class background.

At the time of Mary Pix, “The ideal of the one-breadwinner family had not yet become dominant”; whereas in 18th-century families it was normal for the woman to stay at home taking care of the children, house and servants, in Restoration England husband and wife worked together in familiar enterprises that sustained them both, and female playwrights earned the same wage as their male counterparts.

Morgan also points out that “till the close of the period, authorship was not generally advertised on playbills, nor always proclaimed when plays were printed”. This made it easier for female authors to hide their identity so as to be more easily accepted among the most conservative audiences.

As Morgan points out, “plays were valued according to how they performed and not by who wrote them. When authorship ―female or otherwise― remained a matter of passing interest, female playwrights were in an open and equal market with their male colleagues” (Morgan, 1991: xx); the fact that the author was not very important made it easier for female writers to use male names, so their plays would be more easily accepted. This explains why many of the plays written by females have been lost, unknown about and why they have been mistakenly attributed to some other male authors of the time.

Although some contemporary women writers, like Aphra Behn, have been rediscovered, even the most specialised scholars have little knowledge of works by writers such as Catherine Trotter, Delariviere Manley or Mary Pix. Plays like The Beau Defeated (1700) present with a wider range of female characters than plays written by men at the time.