“Romances in France have for a long time been the diversion and amusement of the whole world; the people ... have read these works with a most surprising greediness; but that fury is very much abated, and they are all fallen off from this distraction. The little histories of this kind have taken place [sic] of romances, whose prodigious number of volumes were sufficient to tire and satiate such whose heads were most filled with these notions.... These little pieces which have banished romances are much more agreeable to the brisk and impetuous humor of the English, who have naturally no taste for long-winded performances; for they have no sooner begun a book than they desire to see the end of it.”
These remarks will doubtless strike some readers as curious, and we may well wonder what the followers of Taine, particularly, would make of the “brisk and impetuous humor” here alleged to characterize the English people. But they are valuable to us, irrespective of their psychology, because they enable us to understand how the new fiction—the fiction in which, despite all adventitious differences, we can clearly recognize the beginnings of the modern novel—arose to take the place of the Anglo-French romance. The “little histories” to which Mrs. Manley refers grew up by the most natural process of reaction against the “prodigious number of volumes” into which, as we have noted, the older narratives had run. Nor was it in measure only that a change was initiated. As we shall presently see, the novel of the Restoration, broadly so-called, differed from its predecessors not merely in length, but also in the more important qualities of subject-matter, treatment, and style. The old Arcadia was finally forsaken for the solid earth, and lengthy descriptions, multifarious episodes, wearisome soliloquies, and needless tortuosities of plot were at the same time left behind. Real life now formed the basis of the story, and, despite occasional reminiscences of the older manner, crispness of narration became one of the writers’ principal aims.
We have here undertaken to consider a little this healthy and significant change from the romance to the novel in the writings of two of its representative exponents—Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley. It should be understood, however, that in adopting this course we have no intention of throwing their work into undue prominence. They were but part-factors in a general movement, and must be contented to share its honors with a number of their contemporaries. Nevertheless, they possess a special interest for the student of English literature, for two very good reasons. In the first place, taken together, they illustrate with remarkable clearness those broader characteristics of the new fiction which it is our principal concern in this little essay to bring to light; and, secondly, there is the fact that they were women. It is surely in itself instructive to find that while the great Elizabethan drama can adduce no example of a woman-writer, it is in the productions of a couple of women that we can study to the best advantage some of the rudimentary developments of the modern novel.[[10]]
It will be convenient for us to ignore the strict demands of chronology and begin with the work of Mrs. Manley, which, though somewhat later in date than Mrs. Behn’s, may properly be taken first, since it is at once cruder in form and historically of minor importance.
Mrs. De la Riviere Manley—“poor Mrs. Manley,” as Swift calls her, in the “Journal to Stella”—enjoyed anything but a peaceful life. It seems to be an accepted tradition among biographers of men and women of letters to begin their narratives by protesting that the lives of authors seldom furnish exciting materials, and then to go on to add that their particular heroes or heroines are exceptions to the general rule. Certainly Mrs. Manley was an exception, if rule indeed it be, which I think open to question. She herself has given us some account of her adventures and misfortunes in different portions of her “New Atalantis,” and more particularly in “The History of Rivella”—an autobiography and apologia pro vitâ sua—published in 1714, under the pseudonym of Sir Charles Lovemore. There is no need for us to follow her through all her varied experiences, the record of which, though often lively enough, is seldom of a very improving character. It will be sufficient to give the briefest outline of her career.
She was born in Guernsey about the year 1677, her father, Sir Roger Manley, being, as is generally stated, governor, or, as seems more probable, deputy governor, of that island. According to her own account, she grew up into a sharp-witted, impressionable girl, who, receiving rather more than an average education, early gave signs of an intelligence beyond what, at that time, was considered the fair endowment of her sex. Her tribulations, too, began early. Her parents died when she was still very young, and she fell into the hands of a male cousin, who unfortunately became enamored of her. The man was known to be married already, but he asserted that his wife was dead; and Rivella, deceived by his protestations, entered into a secret marriage with him. The theme of one of her most unsavory stories seems to have been directly suggested by this tragic episode in her own life. After a while, of course, the truth came out. Then her scoundrelly husband abandoned her, and she was left to shift for herself as best she might. About this time she gained the patronage of the famous Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles the Second’s mistresses, in attendance upon whom she remained during some six months. But the Duchess was a woman of fickle temper. She soon grew tired of Mrs. Manley; and, by pretending that she had discovered her in an intrigue with her son (and there may possibly have been more ground than poor Rivella admits for the allegation), found an excuse for dismissing her from her service. It was now that Mrs. Manley appears to have taken up her pen in earnest—and a very reckless and caustic pen it by and by turned out to be. Her tragedy, “The Royal Mistress,” acted in 1696, proved so successful that she found herself courted by all the dandies and witlings of the day; and for some years, as a consequence, she spent her time principally in getting out of one intrigue into another. Nevertheless, she found leisure, amid all her excitements, to write and produce her “Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, from the New Atalantis”—a work which, under the most thinly disguised names, attacked in an extremely violent and outspoken manner the men who had been mainly instrumental in bringing about the Revolution. In virtue of this production Mrs. Manley may be said to have secured the doubtful honor of being the first political woman-writer in England. So successful was the satire in reaching those for whom it was intended, that the printer was straightway apprehended; but Mrs. Manley—who, as Swift contemptuously put it, “had generous principles for one of her sort”—would not allow him to suffer in her behalf. She appeared before the Court of King’s Bench, and declared herself solely responsible for the entire undertaking, maintaining, moreover, “with unaltered constancy, that the whole work was mere invention, without any cynical allusion to real characters.”[[11]] Mrs. Manley, indeed, seems to have cared a great deal more about getting her printer out of a scrape than about sticking too solemnly to the simple truth; since, apart altogether from the manifestly satirical intention of the book, we know that she made its publication the basis of a personal application to the ministry. In the “Journal to Stella,” Swift tells us how he afterwards met Mrs. Manley at the house of Lord Peterborough, and adds that she was there “soliciting him to get some pension or reward for her service in the cause, by writing her ‘Atalantis.’” Still we must frankly admit that her loyalty to the printer in such a crisis throws her character into a rather favorable light.
However, after a short period of confinement, and sundry appearances before the court, Mrs. Manley was allowed to go free, and the matter dropped. After this adventure, she produced several dramatic pieces, wrote some pamphlets of a political kind, and for a time conducted “The Examiner,” which had then been relinquished by Swift. Indeed, she appears to have remained in the full swing of activity to the close of her life. She died, aged about forty-seven, in 1724, at the house of one John Barber, an alderman of the City of London, with whom it is supposed she had for some time past been living.
In person, as she herself very candidly tells us, Mrs. Manley was fat, and her face had been early marked by that terrible scourge of the age, the smallpox; notwithstanding which defects, her fascination of manner and conversation was so great, that she was always popular with the other sex. Of her moral character, perhaps, the less said the better. Circumstances had not been kind to Rivella; and at this distance of time, and with all the intrigues in which she was involved, it is not always easy to say how far she was sinned against, and how far sinning, or whether her own statement came anywhere near the facts of the case when she boldly declared that “her virtues” were “her own, her vices occasioned by her misfortunes.” Still we must admit the truth of the words which she has put into the mouth of d’Aumont in the “History of Rivella”: “If she have but half so much of the practice as the theory, in the way of love, she must certainly be a most accomplished person.” And a most accomplished person, after her own fashion, she evidently seems to have been.
The most famous of her writings—if the word famous can properly be used, when they have all passed into oblivion—is, of course, the “New Atalantis”—that veritable “cornucopia of scandal,” as Swift dubbed it. This work swept its author into temporary notoriety, and for a few years was perhaps as much talked of and discussed as any publication of the time. But the life has long since gone out of its personalities and topical allusions, and the ordinary reader of English literature, if he recall it even by name, is likely to remember it only for the use Pope makes of it in a well-known passage in “The Rape of the Lock”:—
“Let wreaths of triumph now my temples twine!