A great change took place in the public taste during the next hundred years, so that Mrs. Behn's novels, plays, and poems fell into disrepute. Sir Walter Scott tells the story of his grand-aunt who expressed a desire to see again Mrs. Behn's novels, which she had read with delight in her youth. He sent them to her sealed and marked "private and confidential." The next time he saw her, she gave them back with the words:
"Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn, and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I find it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upward, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which sixty years ago I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London?"
Mrs. Behn has been accused of great license in her conduct and of gross immorality in her writings. Her friend and biographer says of the former: "For my part I knew her intimately, and never saw ought unbecoming the just modesty of our sex, though more free and gay than the folly of the precise will allow." For the latter the fashion must be blamed more than she. Mrs. Behn was not actuated by the high moral principles of Mademoiselle de Scudéri and Madame de Lafayette, with whom love was an ennobling passion, nor was she writing for the refined men and women of the Hotel Rambouillet; she was striving to earn a living by pleasing the court of Charles the Second, and in that she was eminently successful.
Nearly a quarter of a century after the death of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley published anonymously the first two volumes of the New Atlantis, the book by which she is chiefly known, under the title of Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean. Mrs. Manley was a Tory, and she peopled the New Atalantis with members of the Whig party under Marlborough as Prince Fortunatus. The book is written in the form of a conversation carried on by Astrea, Virtue, and Intelligence, a personification of the Court Gazette. They described the Whig leaders so accurately, and related the scandal of the court so faithfully, that, although fictitious names were used, no key was needed to recognise the personages in the story.
The publisher and printer were arrested for libel, but Mrs. Manley came forward and owned the authorship. In her trial she was placed under a severe cross-examination by Lord Sunderland, who attempted to learn where she had obtained her information. She persisted in her statement that no real characters were meant, that it was all a work of imagination, but if it bore any resemblance to truth it must have come to her by inspiration. Upon Lord Sunderland's objecting to this statement, on the grounds that so immoral a book bore no trace of divine impulse, she replied that there were evil angels as well as good, who might possess equal powers of inspiration. The book was published in May, 1709; in the following February, she was discharged by order of the Queen's Bench.
Soon after her discharge from court, she wrote a third and fourth volume of the New Atalantis under the title, Memoirs of Europe toward the Close of the Eighth Century written by Eginardus, Secretary and Favorite to Charlemagne, and done into English, by the Translator of the New Atalantis. Here she has followed the French models. There is a loosely constructed plot, and the characters tell a series of stories. Many of the writers of Queen Anne's reign are described with none of that lustre that surrounds them now, but as they appeared to a cynical woman who knew them well. She refers to Steele as Don Phaebo, and ridicules his search for the philosopher's stone; and laments that Addison, whom she calls Maro, should prostitute his talents for gold, when he might become a second Vergil.
Mrs. Manley had been well trained to write a book like the New Atalantis. At sixteen, an age when Addison and Steele were at the Charterhouse preparing for Oxford, her father, Sir Roger Manley, died. A cousin, taking advantage of her helplessness, deceived her by a false marriage, and after three years abandoned her. Upon this she entered the household of the Duchess of Cleveland, the mistress of Charles the Second, who soon tired of her and dismissed her from her service. She then began to write, and by her plays and political articles soon won an acknowledged place among the writers of Grub Street.
From the many references to her in the letters and journals of the period, she seems to have been popular with the writers of both political parties. Swift writes to Stella that she is a very generous person "for one of that sort," which many little incidents prove. She dedicated her play Lucius to Steele, with whom she was on alternate terms of enmity and friendship, as a public retribution for her ridicule of him in the New Atalantis, saying that "scandal between Whig and Tory goes for not." Steele, equally generous, wrote a prologue for the play, perhaps in retribution for some of the harsh criticisms of her in the Tatler. All readers of Pope remember the reference to her in the Rape of the Lock, where Lord Petre exclaims that his honour, name and praise shall live
As long as Atalantis shall be read.