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.
I love this, I had never heard of her. 18th century lit is fun but I really have to be in the mood, especially English lit – I think stuff translated from Spanish or French etc benefits from the modern wording of the translator. I often find 18c English lit very hard going. This sounds fun though!
I need a lot of hand-holding with this era; I often read through the text once rather quickly (not actually quickly, but one word after the next without pausing to think about everything I’m not getting) and then read the supplementary stuff in the Broadview Editions, and then I go back and read it again, in what feels like a normal way (only occasionally rereading certain passages) and I think, well, that wasn’t so hard, why didn’t you get that before? But… I didn’t!
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.
That would fit! It might have even been one of the workds quoted about him.
Yes, that’s a good point, that despite the scandal, the penalties could be leveraged politically as it suited those in power, and many suffered those abuses.
Reese, meet Bill (wadholloway), and Bill meet Reese. You both have more patience in reading these earlier centuries than I do! 🙂
Hi Reese.
Marcie, I’ve always enjoyed the more structured and often denser language of nineteenth century writing in English. And for some reason, I also enjoy nineteenth century religion – the faithfulness of the characters to their religion and their willingness to defend it. Now that we are exploring 17th and 18th century writing I am not finding the language to be as difficult as I expected, and the stories, many of them, are positively racy.
There are some very racy bits! Shocking! /giggles And I’m looking forward to my next one (Eliza Haywood’s) because apparently people were giving it the side-eye even back then! (Apparently Miss Betsy Thoughtless was tame, in comparison to Love in Excess. You will love Les liaisons dangereuses… if you can look past there being letters.) The structure I like, the density seems to be what throws me. Maybe you had suspected it would be like Chaucer or Shakespeare? I could see that. Though your interest in the religious themes and qualities baffles me. (Hmmmm, well, there is an element of admiration for those characters’ dedication and commitment to core principles which, on its own I also find appealing (as with some of the characters in Middlemarch, for instance. So, ok, that.)
I am, as you know, not even slightly theist, but my father was a (Anglican) lay preacher so I got to observe close up the disrepancies between preaching and actions. My favourite protagonists are dissenters – Unitarians in the writing of Gaskell and Catherine Helen Spence; the Deans in Heart of Midlothian – but I also like the ‘real’ christians in Jane Austen for instance and more generally the naturalness of religious observance in 19th century life. Of course, I also enjoy anti church sentiment when it comes up – in say, Radcliffe’s The Italian, or Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.
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.
There are so many quotations (from reviews, letters, and lit crit–if one can use that term from that era) attributed to men of that time, in both Spender and Romney, that the scandal seems very real. And it seems that DM’s earnings were disrupted substantially because of the furor around her work.
But I think what you’re saying is that, in the broader context, they overcame the scandal, ultimately? After all, we ARE reaidng them now? Similar, maybe, to the way that members of the far right constantly complains of being cancelled while they are actually expressing themselves freely with their talk of cancellation? (I’m thinking of the fuss about Mr. Potato Head and the Dr. Suess books a few years ago, that kind of thing. All the publicity both Mr PH and the Dr. Suess books benefitted from along the way.) That the women were still publishing and their work devoured by many readers the entire time?
I agree–this matter of scale is hard to comprehend from where we sit. Was it just a brief stifling, or was it a true silencing for those scandalous “ladies” of the early 128thC. On the other hand, some of those 18thC fellas were obviously being nasty about the better-selling women of the day. On the still other hand, Kate O’Brien was mean to Elisabeth Taylor too, and women writers can attack and dismiss effectively as well. On the other other other hand, I’m not sure we’ll ever see DM and AB added to the curriculum as often as we see Defoe and Fielding.
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!
Another reason I think she’s less talked about is the number of variations on her name; this was true, too, with Aphra Behn to some extent, but it seems DM’s has been spelled in so many different ways that I’m sure when I read about her previously I thought she wrote and published in French.
Fascinating! Not a writer I’ve come across before, certainly not in my old bookselling days. Thanks for the introduction, Marcie.
I think it would be fun to read some of these and match them up with contemporary authors. I feel like one could have fun with DM and Patricia Lockwood for instance, not that I’ve actually read enough of either woman’s work to say that confidently!