Fabulous and scandalous, Delariver Manley—alongside Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood—was one of the most popular and recognisable among English women writers in the early eighteenth century.
She presents readers with a fictional biographer, responsible for telling us her own story, in The Adventures of Rivella (1714). She is Rivella; and readers are There For It, because they’ve already gobbled up her roman à clef (such a notorious work that it led to her arrest), published five years earlier.
But straightaway with Rivella, readers have to wonder about Sir Charles Lovemore’s placement; he admits to being her friend. Will readers get the whole story? This friendship, however—to Lovemore’s view—is an advantage.
His position affords readers access to pertinent and unique information, and readers can Trust him, because he places tremendous value on truthfulness and he’s seeking answers—honest answers—just like his readers. (It sounds like the prefatory remarks to Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko—stressing the author’s authority.)
And Lovemore is preferable to the other man readers meet at the outset, whose serial interruptions are annoying and obsessively detailed (moving through a list of body parts, for instance, which is more precise and intimate than I’d’ve expected from an 18th-century narrative).
Both the introduction and the appendices of my copy (Broadview) reveal that this set-up, a tale told to someone who seeks the truth, is partly in response to a real-life situation, in which Delarivier Manley had learned that someone else was intending to publish the story of her life (errrrr, Rivella’s life) but, when she got wind of it and contacted the publisher, the original author and the publisher agreed that Delarivier herself would write her own (errrr, Rivella’s own) life.
In real-life, Delarivier’s biography was expected to be popular, as the author of The New Atalantis, a story as bold as it was scandalous, tremendously popular and publicly impugned. (Of course, it’s difficult to judge just how scandalous it was, in an era when a woman writing anything at all for publication was scandalous, regardless of content.) So the fact that it was to be told was important alone, let alone who/how told it.
Lovemore is intended to give “testimony to the heroine’s love of truth and justice” but, just as with Behn’s Oroonoko, there is considerable debate (from both contemporaries and from modern-day critics/scholars, like Catherine Zelinsky, whom I’ve just cited and will cite below) as to what’s truthful and just, and what’s—not.
The story itself includes not only a romance, but also a judicial plotline—where the “half-truths and false pretences form a persistent narrative thread in Rivella’s factually-grounded lawsuit sequence”.
Here, Manley’s decision to have Lovemore tell the story introduces a curious layer. Had she, herself, told the story directly, when “female betrayal and rivalry” emerge in the story, we would see the impact of this on one woman alone; Lovemore, however, as a man privileged in his patriarchal position in society, views not just a situation but how an entire system would be vulnerable to women’s (mis) use of power and how their betrayals and rivalries might impact law and politics and other public spheres.
This point-of-view feels novelistic to me. Particularly when we, readers, are privy to Lovemore’s biases and resentments. (We see what he says, we see whether/how he shapes what he says, and we think about how stories are told and, when we close the volume, we remember he wasn’t actually the storyteller.)
“Valuing myself as I do upon the reputation of an impartial historian, neither blind to Rivella’s weaknesses and misfortunes, as being once her lover, not angry and severe as remembering I could never be beloved; I have joined together the just, and the tender, not expatiated with malice upon her faults, nor yet blindly overlooking them.”
Ohhhh, so they’re not “just friends”: good to know. Lovemore arranges his material to influence readers’ opinions, which whispers to readers that Manley herself has included/excluded, interrupted/backtracked, and emphasised/minimised to persuade her readers as to the veracity of charges made against her (by Lovemore, in this context, but also beyond).
“It was perfectly necessary that I should enter into this long digression, to inform you of the true state of things, before I give you knowledge of an affair, by which Rivella was presented with fresh occasion to renew the complaint she so justly had against fortune, for turning all her prospects of good into evil.”
The last page of the story clearly adopts the perspective of the storyteller, whose motives and intentions can be traced through the statements about the different ways in which a writer can shape a story.
There are so many reasons to read these early novels. I’ve been inspired most of all by Dale Spender, but more recently by books like Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like a Woman (2022) and Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf (2026).
As well as Bill’s Gen 0 Project and ongoing explorations of early narrative, and the fabulous Broadview Press Editions. (Their lists for Bookshelf subscriptions serve as great reading lists, by century or theme.)
Like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Delariver Manley’s The Adventures of Rivella is short; the supplementary materials were as long as the work itself in my edition. I’m certain scholars would get far more out of it than I have, but I am enjoying this process of expanding my imagined “canon”.
As Rebecca Romney says, “The Canon is most useful when we say “yes, and”- using it as a starting point for a richer and more expansive approach to our reading.”
Yes, please. More, please.
Just a name to me–maybe she was in a biography of Swift, I read? But this does sound fascinating and fun.
I might agree with wadholloway up above. In some ways I think the 1800s were easier on women writers than the 1900s. Getting the education, then the 50 pounds a year and a room of one’s own was harder maybe, but if you got all that…then of itself it wasn’t as scandalous as it would become. Of course, the pamphlet wars were a dangerous business for all writers. In that Joseph Johnson biography (half a century later) there were lots of women writers, but it was Johnson himself who ended up in jail for offending the Tories.
This is my opinion. I’m not sure what arguments I can marshall, especially at short notice, to support it.
Just as the 1950s stand between us, now and a proper understanding of the relative freedoms of the first half of the century; so the Victorian period, and particularly the male gatekeepers of that period, stand between us and a proper understanding of the often ribald literature of the period(s) before.
Further, I am not convinced that female writers were ‘scandalous’ – after all we know of several who earned a living and even supported husbands with their writing – but rather that the Victorians disregarded them and so they were faded into that obscurity from which we are now doing our little bit to recover them.
Oh my goodness, I thought I was pretty well-read on this period but this author has completely passed me by! I’m going to search out a copy immediately – thanks Marcie!
Fascinating! Not a writer I’ve come across before, certainly not in my old bookselling days. Thanks for the introduction, Marcie.