Scholarship on Delarivier Manley: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

This essay offers an overview of scholarship on Delarivier Manley, from her marginalization by twentieth‐century literary historians, to her scholarly recuperation in the 1980s, to the recent critical reappraisal of her as an innovative writer of political secret histories and an important voice in the female theatre world of the 1690s. This recent scholarship corrects the misperception of Manley as a (mediocre) novelist and finally does her justice as an innovator in every genre in which she wrote—including drama, poetry, epistolary travelogue, secret history, periodical, pamphlet, memoir, and novella. An overview of the historical trends in the field is followed by summaries of recent research on her works in various literary genres.