New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Power, Sex, and Text eds. by Aleksondra Hultquist and Elizabeth J. Matthews (review)

University courses in English literature on the "rise" of the novel often include Delarivier Manley's roman à clef of 1709, The New Atalantis, in which a series of tales of political and sexual corruption are told to a group of traveling allegorical women: Virtue, Astrea, and Intelligence. The New Atalantis indicates that the "new" prose fiction of the period is forged through the techniques of (secret) history and paper wars, that early prose narrative cheerfully mixed the allegorical and the everyday, the cynical and the ideal, private passions and public politics. Delarivier Manley was a friend of Richard Steele, received financial patronage for her partisan writing from Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, filled in for Jonathan Swift in writing numbers of the Tory periodical vehicle, The Examiner, and became mistress in later life to a notorious Jacobite printer and mayor of London, John Barber. She was also one of the first women to edit and contribute to an anthology of poetry by other women, the 1700 volume called The Nine Muses, which mourned the death of John Dryden. Her life and powerful connections have been charted in two distinguished biographies by Ruth Herman (The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delariver Manley [2003]) and Rachel Carnell (A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley [2008]), who are also the joint editors of a fine, usable five-volume Selected Works (2005). However, until now, scholars and students have had to struggle to find critical material that places the work's author in her wider oeuvre, and its ideological and aesthetic contexts. Aleksondra Hultquist and Elizabeth J. Mathews have succeeded in providing that book as well as showcasing some of the most intelligent new thinking and methodological directions in feminist literary history.

The authors are explicit about the aims of the book. First, it is designed to flesh out Manley's oeuvre by giving attention to less familiar works than her relatively well-known scandal fictions. Accordingly, essays remind us that her first literary productions were in fact plays (the most lucrative form of writing in the period), a tragedy entitled The Royal Mischief and a comedy The Lost Lover. Both appeared in 1696 and the same year saw printed an epistolary collection, Letters Writen by Mrs Manley (reissued in 1725 under the new title of A Stagecoach Journey to Exeter), which she apparently had not given permission to publish. Essays by Bernadette Andrea and Victoria Joule address Manley's first ventures into tragedy and comedy respectively, while Misty Krueger discusses a later oriental tragedy, Almyna, or the Arabian Vow (1710) and its modern formulation of heroism which reforms rather than revenges. Several essays focus on the last work she wrote, entitled The Power of Love in Seven Novels (1720), a collection of seven stories selected and adapted from William Painter's 1566 The Palace of Pleasure (itself a palimpsest of stories from European writers such as Bandello and Boccaccio). Second, the editors aim to give Manley "a firm push toward canonicity" beyond the work of recovery that brought her to attention in the 1990s (to which I and Toni Bowers contributed); this collection generates conversations between scholars which serve to identify how analysis of her works might further contribute to current trends in critical thinking: in history of the book, queer studies, and world literatures. Those conversations are enabled by grouping essays under three general themes of "power," "sex," and "text." They are also made possible by careful and consistent referencing to arguments made in other essays to point readers to relevant connections.

Much in this collection is new and rich. Especially rewarding is the consistent argument that what looks like formal unevenness or incoherence might be better understood as a purposive miscellaneity which promotes a sceptical reading practice. Kim Simpson and Jennifer Frangos argue that...